How to start your own podcast

Starting a podcast is easier than ever.

In this article, we’ll explain exactly what you need to do if you want to start your own podcast.

Plus, in case you need any persuasion about why you might want to start your own podcast, we’ll also tell you why having your own podcast can be so beneficial for your business, with some insights into how starting a podcast has helped our business to grow.

This is a long, in-depth article (+5000 words!), so feel free to use the links below to skip to the section you need.

Six steps for creating a podcast

1. Preparing your podcast →
2. Recording your podcast →
3. Editing your podcast →
4. Publishing your podcast →
5. Sharing your podcast →
6. Promoting your podcast →

1. Preparing your podcast

Choose a theme

The first thing you need to do to start your podcast is to identify a theme or premise.

It’s all very well saying “Let’s just make a <insert company name> podcast”, but you might want to think a bit more about your ‘angle’.

For a podcast to have any sort of longevity, you need to come up with a theme that you’ll be passionate about and that won’t leave you struggling for ideas for content.

So, rather than choosing a theme like “Our podcast is a series of interviews with every employee in our company about how great it is to work at our company”, you might instead choose to focus on talking about the industry that you operate in, and have the people from your company – who are extremely knowledgeable about your chosen industry – discuss newsworthy events and share relevant information.

By speaking with confidence and authority about a subject that you’re knowledgeable about, you assert that you (and, by proxy, your company) know what you’re talking about.

You don’t need to spend every podcast episode talking about how fantastic your company is – people don’t tune in to listen to adverts and that’s not what podcasts are for.

If people are sufficiently impressed by what they hear when you’re speaking with authority about something they’re interested in, they will go and do their own research about your products and services. You don’t need to directly advertise to them, your marketing can be more subtle than that.

Who is the podcast for?

To decide on the theme of your podcast or plan what you’re going to talk about, it might help you to think about who you are making the podcast for.

You should speak to your audience in a tone that would appeal to them, and you should always try to offer some kind of value. Teach them something that they didn’t already know and do it in an engaging and entertaining way, and you’ll build a more loyal and enthusiastic listener base.

Ask yourself these questions:

• What is the goal of your podcast?
• What is the ‘why’ behind your podcast?
• Who is your ideal listener?
• What makes your podcast unique?

Think about the things that your target audience would find interesting, and tailor your content and style of delivery appropriately.

A podcast targeted at senior executives that you’re hoping will give your company some business would likely sound quite different to a podcast aimed at food lovers who want to hear about what celebrities would choose to eat for their dream meal.

Or maybe it wouldn’t?

Name your podcast

Before you hit that record button, you need to know what you’re going to call your podcast so that you can introduce it.

Don’t underestimate the power of a name. Your podcast name should speak to you and to your audience. Listeners should know what the podcast is all about from just the name alone.

Check that the name you come up with isn’t already being used or isn’t too similar to an existing podcast, and make it simple for people to find you by making it easy to spell and pronounce.

Describe your podcast

The description of your podcast is what potential listeners will read when deciding whether or not to listen, so take it seriously and think about what you’re going to write.

This may develop over time as you get into your groove, but writing a description or summary of your podcast before you even record your first episode might help you to manifest all of your thoughts about what you’d like the podcast to become.

Make it clear what the listener can expect to hear by including your podcast’s value proposition and describing what you’re about.

Also, remember that podcast platforms are mini search engines, so be sure to include keywords that you want to be associated with to help people find your podcast.

Different podcast platforms provide different limits for the length that your description can be, but aim for 400-600 characters.

Design your cover art

The final stage in creating your new podcast is designing the cover art.

Most podcast platforms have an interface that includes an image for each podcast next to their title, and having an eye-catching cover can be another great way of standing out from the crowd and communicating quickly what your podcast is about.

Podcast cover art images are square and should be between 1500×1500 pixels and 3000×3000 pixels.

Don’t use too many words in your image, and remember that in many use cases (such as in mobile apps) the image might be displayed quite small, so don’t make it too complicated or intricate.

You can use tools like Canva or Adobe Express to create cover art images yourself, or you can pay a graphic designer to design one for you.

Plan each episode

As well as sounding great (see section 2), your podcast needs to be engaging and worth listening to.

The key to making a great podcast episode is to prepare an outline before you begin.

Unless your podcast is meant to be scripted, you don’t need to script the entire episode. But you should have some idea of the key points that you’d like to discuss.

Start with the end in mind and think about what the key takeaways are that you’d like your listener to have. If you’ve already determined who your ideal listener is, you can prepare with them in mind to make sure that they get the most out of each episode.

If you’re interviewing a guest, you might find it useful to note down some questions that you’d like to ask them, or do some research about their background so that you can bring up key moments or information that’s relevant to your episode.

2. Recording your podcast

What equipment do you need to record a podcast?

To begin your journey into podcasting, you actually need very little equipment.

In essence, you’ll need some method of recording your audio, a means to listen to what you’ve recorded, and a computer or mobile device that you can use to upload your recording.

Your mobile phone has a pretty good microphone and there are usually built-in apps that you can use to make audio recordings, which are saved to your mobile phone.

Practically, though, this won’t give you the high-quality audio that you’re used to hearing on other podcasts, and you’ll soon want to progress to more professional equipment.

If your podcast doesn’t sound great, nobody is going to listen for long.

Typically, a podcast recording setup will consist of the following:

• Microphone(s)
• A computer or a standalone audio recorder
• Cables
• Memory cards or hard drives as required
• Headphones

Microphone jargon explained

When you start to look to buy a microphone, you’ll come across terms like “XLR”, “dynamic”, “preamp”, “phantom power” and “shock mount” that you might not be familiar with.

No doubt you’ll search for things like “best podcasting microphone” and be met with lists on countless websites with contrasting suggestions and affiliate links.

We won’t recommend any particular microphones to you here, but we’ll give you enough information so that you can be suitably aware of what you should be looking for.

Most microphones will have either an XLR connection or a USB connection. The most versatile will have both.

XLR is a standard type of connector used in all kinds of audio equipment. It’s circular with three pins, and usually the cables have a locking mechanism that clicks into place when properly inserted to prevent accidentally detaching the cable.

An XLR cable is capable of transmitting power as well as audio signals. Often, microphones require something called “phantom power”, which means that they need a power supply in order to function properly, while not having a typical power socket. “Phantom power” is power that’s supplied along an XLR cable.

If your microphone states that it requires phantom power on its packaging, you’ll need to check that your audio recorder or audio interface is capable of supplying phantom power.

Microphones that have USB connections will receive their power and transmit their data along the USB cable.

If a microphone has both an XLR and a USB connection, you will only need to use one or the other – whichever suits your recording setup.

Types of microphones you might come across when looking for a podcasting microphone include “dynamic” microphones and “condenser” microphones.

“Condenser” microphones are typically used for recording musical instruments or sung vocals, and often need to be combined with some kind of amplifier (or “preamp”).

In the world of podcasting, “dynamic” microphones are more commonly used, being better suited to recording spoken vocals and usually not requiring any amplification.

Don’t confuse ‘requiring amplification’ with ‘requiring phantom power’. A dynamic microphone that doesn’t require amplification might still need phantom power in order to work.

A microphone “shock mount” is used for mounting a microphone on a stand or adjustable arm so that it can hang freely without being directly connected to the stand or desk. The elastic connection isolates the microphone and prevents any knocks or vibrations from the desk or stand from being transferred into the microphone.

Check that the shock mount you’re planning to use is compatible with the microphone you have, as they sometimes have unique connections for particular microphones.

A note about audio levels

Audio levels are measured in decibels (db).

The maximum level on the volume scale is 0db (zero), while quieter levels are displayed as negative numbers (e.g. -12db).

Depending on the recording equipment you’re using, the volume will usually be displayed with some kind of vertical or horizontal bar that moves up and down as you speak.

Sometimes these scales use colour to show whether the audio level is too loud or not, such as turning amber and then red as the volume approaches the 0db limit.

When setting up your equipment and testing the audio levels, you should always aim to keep the gain control in a position such that the volume doesn’t reach 0db.

If the audio from a microphone reaches or exceeds 0db, the recording will be distorted and ‘clipped’. Essentially, recording equipment is usually not capable of recording any data for audio that is above the 0db limit, so that data gets lost (or ‘clipped’) from the recording.

You should aim to have the loudest ‘peaks’ of your audio input set so that they are above -21db at their quietest and reach between -9db and -3db at their peak, depending on the equipment you’re using.

When editing your podcast, it is far better to have to raise the volume of a quiet recording than to reduce the volume of a recording that’s too loud, so bear that in mind when setting up and testing your equipment.

Take a photo of your settings or save them as a preset so that you can use them again in your next recording.

How to record your podcast

• Recording in-person →
• Recording remotely →

Recording in-person

First, the basics.

It might sound obvious, but you’ll need one microphone for each person that will be talking.

The types of microphones that are used for recording speech will generally work better if the user speaks directly into them from close range, and they won’t be suitable for, say, putting between people to pick up speech from multiple people from a distance.

The microphones will each need to be connected using cables to an audio recorder or computer.

The audio recorder would ideally need to be able to record each microphone input to its own channel and be able to provide phantom power for microphones that needed it.

Standalone audio recorders include models such as the Zoom H4n (which is capable of providing phantom power to and recording two XLR connections simultaneously) and the Zoom H8 (which has 6 XLR connections). They give control over the recording levels of each channel and record to a microSD card. These are generally battery-powered, meaning they’re extremely portable, but you need to keep a close eye on them to make sure they don’t die part-way through your recording.

In our experience with the Zoom H5, which we used to record our podcast for over 2 years, we found that the batteries tended to last multiple hours, even while providing phantom power to two microphones, and it was more than capable of being used for what we needed. Similarly, a 32GB microSD card was capable of recording many hours of high-bitrate audio, and we didn’t find ourselves needing to stop recordings to change the SD card.

More advanced standalone units like the RØDE RØDECaster Pro II, which is purpose-designed for podcast production, allow for the recording of 4 XLR microphones and monitoring through 4 separate headphone connections, as well as having a Bluetooth connection so that recordings can incorporate guests via mobile phone calls.

The RØDECaster Pro can record to a microSD card and to a computer via USB connection simultaneously, offering an extra level of data redundancy, and has outputs for connecting speakers.

If you would prefer not to use an external audio recorder device like a RØDECaster Pro or Zoom recorder, you may choose instead to record directly to a computer or laptop.

Depending on the type of microphone that you prefer, you may need some kind of interface for connecting XLR microphones to your computer, or a USB hub if you don’t have enough USB ports for the number of USB microphones you’re using.

Popular audio interfaces that people use to connect XLR microphones to their computers include the Focusrite Scarlett range or Focusrite Vocaster range.

USB microphones can be connected via a USB hub, and your computer should recognise that each microphone is separate and can be recorded onto its own channel.

To record audio directly on your computer, you’ll need to use some kind of recording software.

RØDE have some free recording software called RØDE Connect, which has an interface that’s similar to their physical RØDEcaster Pro device.

There are also a variety of other multi-channel recording apps available, such as Audacity, GarageBand and Adobe Audition.

Recording remotely

You may decide that, instead of inviting people to join you in person, you wish to record your podcasts remotely.

All of the information presented thus far is based on having multiple people speaking to each other while in the same room. However, the advent of tools like Skype and Zoom heralded a new age of communication, and there’s now an abundance of great web-based tools that can be used for recording podcasts.

At a basic level, virtual meeting tools like Skype, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet all have call recording functionality built in. Some have limitations about the length of meetings that can be held, and the quality of the audio isn’t always great, so you may decide to ask your remote guest to record their audio separately to get a better quality recording.

There are a number of web-based tools like Riverside, RINGR, Squadcast and Zencastr that offer high-resolution audio and video recording and are purpose-designed for recording podcasts, whereas tools like Zoom and Skype are primarily video meeting software.

These bespoke podcast recording software tools usually require some kind of subscription to achieve longer recording times or added functionality, but can be a great way to involve multiple people in a recording that otherwise wouldn’t be able to get together in person.

Look for a tool like Riverside that has an option for guests to record their audio and video locally, so the quality isn’t affected by faulty internet connections.

On Apple computers, QuickTime is installed by default and allows users to quickly record audio and video on their own computer, which may come in useful if the software you’re using doesn’t have any local recording functionality.

Windows computers have a similar tool called Voice Recorder (Windows 10) or Sound Recorder (Windows 11), which can be used for quickly recording audio in a pinch.

Setting up the microphones

When setting up each microphone, the aim is to set the gain levels up so that they pick up the speech of the person talking clearly, but don’t pick up the audio of the other people in the room.

It’s better to be conservative when setting the recording level. You don’t want the recording to be too loud, because it will sound distorted. It is far easier to make a quiet recording louder than it is to try to fix a loud, clipped recording.

The goal is to have each microphone channel recording only the person using that microphone, as it makes it much easier to edit the audio later.

To achieve this, you’ll need to dial down the gain level of the microphone and place it closer to the person using it. You’ll probably have seen video clips of people recording podcasts or broadcasting on radio, and noticed that the microphones are quite close to the person’s mouth when they speak. This is why they do that.

Test the recording level by speaking into it at a normal speaking volume and ensuring that it doesn’t reach anywhere near the red (0db) limit. Then test it with a loud laugh or more excited comment and again check that it doesn’t peak above the 0db limit.

If you don’t have the microphone close to the person’s mouth, and you dial up the gain level to compensate for the fact that they now sound quieter, what you’ll find is that the person’s voice will sound more echoey (as the microphone is now picking up more of the sound waves that are bouncing around the room) and the microphone will pick up the sound of other people speaking nearby.

The downside of setting up the microphone close to a person’s mouth is that people who aren’t used to recording with them will have a tendency to drift backwards away from them. As far as they’re concerned, they’re talking to the other people in the room and the other people in the room can still hear them, so they don’t realise that their speech isn’t being picked up as clearly by the microphone.

You can compensate for this by mounting the microphones on adjustable arms so that they can be moved closer to the person in whatever seating position they find comfortable.

You should also make efforts to separate the microphones from the desk or table you’re sitting at. When microphones are placed directly on a table, any knocks or taps on the table will be transferred into the microphone and picked up in the audio. Adjustable mounting arms provide a level of disconnection from the table, and microphone shock mounts provide a further level of isolation.

Finally, it’s a good idea to set the microphones up so that they don’t directly point at a person’s mouth, but instead are below or to the side at a slight angle. This reduces the opportunity for any sudden bursts of air to go directly into the microphone and avoids plosive pops.

Setting up the room

Try to choose a space to record your podcast that suffers from minimal background noise.

Background noise like passing traffic, office chatter and machinery can be picked up on your microphones and lead to a recording that’s more difficult to process.

Hard surfaces like hardwood floors or flat walls can cause the sound of your voice to reflect back at you or bounce around the room, leading to an echoey recording that again is more difficult to work with and sounds less professional.

Soft furnishings like rugs and curtains can help to absorb or deflect sound waves as they bounce around a room, and things like moving blankets or duvets can be used to reduce annoying reverb.

If you’re recording in an office environment, try to find a quiet room such as a meeting room or boardroom, or consider recording your podcast outside of office hours, or hiring a recording studio.

As we’ve established, the aim is to achieve as clean a recording as possible with each microphone.

Make a test recording with your setup and check it with headphones before you start the main recording of the episode, so that you can fine-tune the microphone setup, the audio levels and the quality of the recording.

Record an intro and outro

You may choose to record your entire podcast episode, including your introductions and closing statements, all in one go.

However, particularly when you have guests with you, you may find the prospect of nailing an extended introduction without tripping over your words intimidating, or feel awkward talking about what a great guest they were while they’re still sitting with you.

Of course, it’s courteous to introduce a guest at the start of an interview with them, but you may find it easier to record a longer introduction separately, which you can edit to appear at the start of the episode later.

Very rarely do podcasts launch straight into the main conversation, and it’s quite common for the hosts to first introduce what’s coming up in the episode before it begins, and to have a closing conversation to summarise their thoughts at the end.

To be able to introduce what’s coming up and perhaps highlight some of the key things that are said, you’ll obviously need to have recorded the main conversation first.

When recording your intro and outro after the event, try to use the same microphones and recording equipment as you used in your main recording so that the audio sounds consistent. Ideally, in the same room, if that’s possible.

A good introduction gives the listener an insight into what’s coming up, and includes:

• Who you are
• What your podcast is about
• How the listener can expect to benefit from listening

A great outro thanks listeners for tuning in and gives them something to do next – a ‘call-to-action’.

You might ask listeners to leave the podcast a review, follow you on social media, visit your website, or join your email newsletter.

3. Editing your podcast

Now that you’ve recorded your podcast, there are a few final steps to follow before you share it with the world.

If you’ve recorded separate intro and outro sections, you’ll need to add these to the start and end of your audio file.

The post-production phase also gives you an opportunity to normalise the volume across the recording, remove any mistakes or unwanted sections, add music or sound effects, and make sure that you’re happy with the final product.

Open conversations may result in going off on tangents, and you may choose to trim the fat and just keep the best parts, so that listeners can stay focused and interested.

Stabilising the volume across the recording is absolutely essential, and something that’s often overlooked. Few things are worse for a listener than turning up the volume so that they can hear what’s being said during a spoken section, only to then be blasted by a musical interlude that’s much louder than the spoken section. The listener shouldn’t have to constantly monitor the volume level and dial it up and down through the course of the episode.

Your intro and outro should be quick and get to the point. Any musical introduction or clips that you feature should be quicker still. Listeners have tuned in to hear the episode that you’ve described in your episode description, so let them get to it.

If you want to use music in your podcast, as the introductory theme tune or at any point throughout the episode, you’ll need to make sure that you only use music that you’re permitted to use. There are a variety of great services that you can use to source royalty-free music. Our favourite is Epidemic Sound, which has a massive database of professionally produced music and sound effects.

Editing the podcast yourself

Many of the software tools mentioned earlier in the article that are capable of being used to record your podcast also have tools and features for editing your podcast.

Tools like Adobe Audition, Audacity, GarageBand and Logic Pro all have decent editing capabilities that you can learn how to use.

The better the quality of your recording, with properly set up microphones and audio levels, the easier it will be to edit the audio afterwards.

To be able to remove unwanted background noise or do anything more complicated, though, you may decide instead to send your audio to a professional editor and let them do that hard work for you.

Getting help to edit your podcast

There are a number of extremely talented professional editors on platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, or services like We Edit Podcasts, who can edit your podcast for you.

Usually capable of turning work around within a day or two, hiring an external editor can be a cost-effective and time-efficient way to combine your various audio files, get them sounding great and allow you to publish the podcast within days of recording it.

4. Publishing your podcast

You’ve recorded your first podcast, you’ve got the artwork and descriptions ready to go, and now you need some way of sharing it with the world.

The way that you share your podcast is by uploading it to a podcast hosting provider. The podcast host will then disseminate your podcast to all of the different podcast directories – Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music etc.

Popular podcast hosting platforms include Acast, Buzzsprout, Anchor (now owned by Spotify), SoundCloud and Podbean, but the host that we use and would recommend is Transistor.

We’ve tried multiple platforms – including all of those mentioned above – and have found that Transistor is by far the simplest to use and provides the most comprehensive suite of tools.

One of our favourite features of Transistor is the ability to insert adverts into your podcast. You can upload advert clips and then quickly insert them into the beginning, middle or end of all of your podcast episodes. In each episode, you place a marker at the timestamp(s) where you would like the advert(s) to appear. Then, when you create your advert ‘campaign’, the advert clips will be included at the identified points. If you want to change your adverts at any point in the future, you simply create a new advert ‘campaign’ and swap out the adverts that will be inserted into the episodes at the markers you’d previously identified.

The only other podcast host that we could find that allowed you to dynamically insert and manage adverts in your podcast was Acast, but Acast will only open up that functionality if your podcast is sufficiently large to qualify to join their ‘Creator Network’ (>80k downloads per week!). They also won’t permit you to hard-bake adverts into your episode, and once you do qualify for the ‘Creator Network’ dynamic insertion functionality, you can’t control which adverts are inserted – they come from the ‘Acast Marketplace’, where companies and channels pay to submit adverts that will be spread across the Acast network.

The basic functionality that you will need from any podcast hosting platform is the ability to upload your audio file, give the episode a title and a description, and ideally show you some kind of statistics about how many times your podcast has been downloaded.

Some platforms will create a unique web page for your podcast that you can share, but we wouldn’t consider that to be essential.

Most will allow you to create an embeddable audio player of some sort, which you can embed onto your website, like this:

Unlike some of the other platforms, Transistor doesn’t have a ‘free’ tier, but having tried each of those other platforms and found some problem or other with each of them, we think that the basic ‘starter’ tier of Transistor (currently $19/month or $190/year) is extremely good value for the functionality and ease of use that it offers.

So, in short, choose the podcast hosting platform that you would like to use and create an account, fill in all of the details about your podcast and upload your first episode!

5. Sharing your podcast

If you are thinking about creating a podcast, the chances are that you already listen to podcasts and are familiar with the way that people can listen to them.

There are a variety of different mobile apps and directory websites that you can use to listen to podcasts.

Once your podcast is uploaded to a podcast hosting platform, you can choose which of the podcast players and apps you would like to distribute your podcast to.

Your podcast hosting platform should give you the option to submit your podcast to Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, Amazon Music, Google Podcasts, and a variety of other podcast apps and directories.

To submit your podcast to Apple Podcasts (iTunes), you will need to log in with your Apple account. Most of the other podcast directories (e.g. Overcast, Podchaser, Pocket Casts, Breaker, Castro and Listen Notes) use Apple’s directory as their ‘master copy’, which means if your podcast is submitted to Apple Podcasts it will automatically show up in most of the directories.

Spotify and Amazon Music will also require you to log in with an account to get started, but will open up yet further opportunities for listeners to find your podcast.

In our experience, we haven’t found any reasons not to submit your podcast to as many of the directory platforms as possible.

If your podcast hosting platform doesn’t have an automatic or guided method for submitting your podcast to a specific directory, the host should at least give you the URL for the unique RSS feed for your podcast, which you can use to submit your podcast to the directory yourself.

If your podcast doesn’t appear immediately on the podcast directories once you’ve published it, don’t panic! RSS feeds work on a ‘pull’ rather than a ‘push’ basis, with the platforms periodically scanning the RSS feeds and pulling down new episodes whenever they see an update. Most will update multiple times a day and you should only need to wait a couple of hours at most before your new episode appears.

6. Promoting your podcast

Once you’ve submitted your podcast to a podcast host and they’ve distributed it for you to all of the directories and apps, it’s time to promote your podcast.

Take off your podcast production hat and put on your marketing cap – it’s time to build an audience.

In the first section of this article – Preparing your podcast – you should have thought about who you’re producing your podcast for, tailoring your content and style to what would appeal to them.

This should make it easier to work out how best to market your podcast and find those people.

In general, these are some things you might consider:

• Build anticipation before your launch – create a landing page, develop content for ‘early adopters’, send out teasers and samples.
• Use relevant keywords in your podcast title and episode descriptions – as well as making it possible for people to find your podcast within their podcast directory of choice, search engines can also crawl your podcast feed.
• Send an email newsletter – if you already have a mailing list of contacts, why not tell them about your new podcast?
• Cross-promote on similar podcasts – once you’ve established your podcast, you might like to find other shows that have a similar audience to you and ask if they’re interested in some kind of cross-promotion.
• Engage in communities where your audience can be found – LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups, Twitter channels, forums etc.
• Create a video teaser – juicy snippets of your podcast can make great social media posts.
• Visit in-person events – trade shows, conferences and meetups that relate to your audience are ideal opportunities to tell people about your podcast.

So, why start a podcast?

Now that you know how to start a podcast, it’s important to think about why you’re doing it.

Some good reasons for starting a podcast include:

• To generate leads for your business
• To build awareness of your products or services
• To be recognised for your knowledge about your industry and position yourself as an authority figure
• To build a connection with your target audience

One of the best things about producing a podcast is that it allows you to be heard by people at a time when they’re engaged and receptive to listening to you.

Podcasts are easy to consume, and people can listen to podcasts while they’re on the go – at the gym, during their commute or at the office.

In this social media age, where attention spans are short and people are bombarded with content from all angles, being able to have someone’s undivided attention for 30 minutes or more is invaluable.

You can deep dive into complex topics, interview guests and give voice to members of your company that perhaps don’t get to be heard externally too often.

Here at Comton Group, our podcast The Metal Guys Talk Business has allowed us to get into boardrooms with some of the most influential people from across the industries that we operate in.

We’ve been able to pick the brains of some of the brightest minds in the industry, learnt new things about emerging technologies, and had the opportunity to be heard by thousands of people that we might not have otherwise been able to reach.