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Do You Podcast? Are You Going to Podcast on Your Blog?

Do You Podcast? Are You Going to Podcast on Your Blog?

Yesterday, I brought up the issue of podcasts in What Makes Podcasts Fun To Listen To? The post asked what makes your favorite podcasts fun and successful in your eyes in format and structure.

Podcasts on blogs are growing in popularity. With portable media players, especially iPods, more affordable and accessible, people are downloading podcasts in addition to music. I’m finding podcasts on file sharing services and media marketplaces beyond iTunes. With the ease of adding multimedia to our blogs improving, it’s natural that we want to explore communication beyond the written word and still photographs.

Today, I want to know if you are podcasting on your blog, or if you are considering podcasting.

If you are podcasting, how is it working for you? Are you finding the experience successful? Is traffic and readership increasing? How are you podcasting? Alone or with a host? More than two hosts? How is that working for you?

What equipment and software are you using? How do you record interviews, edit the audio, convert the audio into various formats, and what is the easiest and hardest aspects of podcasting? We want to learn from you, so tell us how your podcasting efforts are working and how it’s evolved as you’ve learned along the way.

Are you considering adding a podcast to your blog? Why? Have you thought about the format, structure, how to handle the files with uploading, downloading, publicizing, and sharing? Will you add music? From where? Copyright free content, your own original music, or what?

See Also
YouTube features for Content Creators

Will your podcast feature just you or will you have more than one host? Considering adding interviews? How? What technology are you considering to add access for interviews and co-hosts? What programs are you considering for editing your recordings?

There are a lot of technical issues that confront bloggers who want to podcast, which keeps many from podcasting. Yet, there is a growing collection of technology that makes the process easier and faster.

Let’s talk about how podcasts work for blogs, or not, and how you can save time generating podcast recordings and publishing on your blog.

View Comments (5)
  • I’ll tell you whut…

    I messed around with BlogTalkRadio.com and it’s very easy to use – and having the opportunity to take live call-ins and have live chat is spectacular.

    This is kind of a carry-over from yesterday’s post…

    But: If you’re not live, it takes a heckuva lot of material to do five quality minutes for a blog podcast.

    I think most podcasters way over-reach.

    Imus, Limbaugh, Keillor, et al don’t make those big bucks for nothing.

    Speaking at 200 wpm – you can do the math. I know I’ve never written a 1000 word post. Filling with music is just filling.

    I’m not into audio editing, so that would be a new skill and probably a chore.

    However, I love it when a blogger I’ve read for a long time, suddenly injects a few minutes of their spoken voice. And I’ve had the same reaction when I did it.

    It’s fun to hear the colloquialisms and accents!

  • I’ve helped others use podPress in the past, but seems like previous version was kind of buggy. Using WP + FeedBurner seems to be a more simpler way.

    Podcasts can build unique audience of a blog. Depends on the blog, I sometimes prefer to listen to podcast.

    A tip: If you mix your podcast within your blog, create a podcast category, so others can subscribe via [yourblog.com]/category/podcast/feed

  • I’ve been podcasting for nearly 4 years now, and I now host a very popular WordPress podcast called WordCast (http://wordcast.bitwire.tv/) along with many others.

    I definitely think that WordPress and PodPress is the easiest way to get a professional sounding podcast out there (because MyPodcast.com looks and sounds more amateur than karaoke at the rec center). However, I’ve found that I can get better results and have more control over what I want to do by implementing a system of custom keys and custom feed templates, as I did over at my primary podcast network, http://bitwire.tv. It works really well, but really isn’t necessary unless you’re doing multiple podcasts on one blog or want an extreme amount of control over publishing, pingbacks, etc.

    As for equipment, I have probably a fairly advanced setup compared to most podcasters, so it’s really not fair to compare. A photo is located at http://tinyurl.com/6lbo2s. I use a Heil PR-40 mic along with a Behringer XENYX 1622FX mixer, a ProCo Short Stop momentary mute switch, an APHEX 204 exciter, and a M-Audio MobilePre USB audio interface, a JK Audio Broadcast Host phone hybrid and various other bits of equipment to get the job done. I also use three different computers: one for recording and playing theme music (some shows I add music in real time), one for Skype and any other communications, and one for reading stories and viewing webpages as I move along with the show. I used to use Adobe Audition for my recording and editing, but I’ve found that a simple open-source program called Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net) gets the job done well and it works great.

    Again, I don’t think it’s really fair to compare, seeing as in most cases all you need is a $20 mic from Radio Shack and a computer to produce a high quality show. Also, the equipment is only one part of putting together a quality podcast. Audio quality is the second most important thing to think about. The first, and most important thing to remember when producing a podcast is to have good quality content. As John Emm, a good friend of mine and a news radio veteran would say, “You need to have something to say and you need to know how to say it.” Everything else is just extra.

  • I dont podcast, but what I do do is make YouTube videos. Those are becoming more readily accessed by mobile phones too (iPhone for example). Plus I dont have to pay for any bandwidth associated with YouTube. So I dont think I’ll ever podcast in the traditional sense.

    Added benefit of making lots of YouTube. videos is my blog gets a good amount of traffic from YouTube. Maybe we should all start adding a face to those podcasts :P

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