Okay, let's look at the email. I'm going to paraphrase this email because that's just what I'm going to do. Basically, it's from an old radio listener. If I mentioned his first name, well, I'm not going to because a bunch of you would know who he is.
But anyway, he goes, I love your radio show. And he goes, I like your podcast. Now, why doesn't he love my podcast? If you love my radio show, why doesn't he love my podcast?
That being said, that being said, we're back to this again because I have once again gotten a couple of emails about this. And by the way, if you want to email me, it's real simple. It's michael.cros, C-R-O-S-E at gmail.com. But I want to know why he doesn't love my podcast.
Anyway, he said, I'm considering starting a podcast because I've always wanted to be in radio. But since radio is dying, I think a podcast is the way to go. Could you please do a podcast about how to start a podcast? No, I can't.
Well, I, you know, because it would be a very long podcast. But I'll tell you what I'm going to do. I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I've been thinking about this.
I'm going to talk a little bit right now about how to start a podcast. I'm not going, you know, but we're not going, here's what we're not going to discuss. We're not going to discuss the why, because I remember when I used to teach podcasting, I would start with the why. And the why is not important.
I mean, you know, I know people who podcast. I know a guy who started a podcast about how to name podcasts or how to name books. That's what he started his podcast about. I have no idea if he's still doing it, but I listened to a couple of episodes and my gosh, it was incredible.
He had his college professor on one of them talking about it. It was, it was, it was fascinating. So you can do a podcast about any damn thing you want to. So feel free.
But I'm not going to discuss the why. I'm just going to discuss the how. So, and with the how comes a couple of questions. And the questions are, is it going to be a solo podcast like I do?
Are you going to sit your fat ass in front of a microphone like I do and talk? You can do that very inexpensively. Okay, let's start with equipment. You can do that.
Let me, do I have one in here? Where's it at? I have one. Oh, it's in that thing down there.
I'm not gonna reach down and get it. You can buy a $60 microphone that is a USB microphone. In other words, it plugs right into your computer. Okay.
Take this microphone, plug it right in. There's several of them out there. Uh, but you know, there's, there's the Samsung Q2 is the one I like. The only thing I'm going to tell you to do is it comes with a nice little microphone stand.
Take the nice little microphone stand and throw it away. And you need to go out and you need to buy a $15 microphone stand off of Amazon. That is a table stand that will bring the microphone up to your mouth level because you've got to have, if you're bent over, you know, because one of the things about running a podcast is microphone technique. Uh, you know, you have to have good microphone technique.
In other words, I talk to my microphone kind of at an angle. Now I've got a really good microphone, but if I had the Samsung, I've, I've done podcasts with that Samsung a bunch of times. As a matter of fact, as a matter of fact, when I was doing a nationally syndicated radio show and I was using an Electro-Voice RE20, which is a very expensive microphone, it broke. And I called up the engineer, the chief engineer.
We called him Blinky. I think he's dead now. Um, and Blinky said, I'm going to overnight you a microphone to use and you send me your microphone and I'm gonna get it fixed. I said, okay, we'll do that.
So sure enough, the next day, FedEx delivers me a Samsung Q2 microphone. Now, the nice thing about that microphone is you can plug it into a USB, but it also has an XLR connection, which you have no idea what I'm talking about. But the fact that you can grow with that microphone because eventually you might want to go into an audio interface, but you don't need that to start with, you know, if you have an audio interface, and there's a lot of options with that right now, just a ton of options with that right now, uh, you can, you know, you can still use this right into your computer and it sounds really, really good. So that's that $60 microphone.
Okay. Samsung Q2. Then you plug that, you know, plug that into the computer. You're going to need software.
And there, my daughter has a podcast that she calls Cassandra Explains It All. It's a popular podcast. And it's good. And she is, she generally has guests, but her guests all come through over Zoom because she doesn't let people in her house.
And she lives in Michigan out in the middle of nowhere. But anyway, uh, she uses Adobe Audition for her software. Now I told her she doesn't need to do that. I let her use my Adobe Audition originally.
She became addicted to it and now she pays for it because you can't buy Adobe Audition. You have to rent it. And I think she pays like 20 some bucks a month for it. So it's, it's just weird.
Uh, there is another one called Audacity. It's free. It is absolutely free. And if you're an Apple person, they have GarageBand, which is also free.
But I will tell you, I have no experience with GarageBand, but I've had very experienced podcast people who have Apple computers who say friends do not let friends record a podcast on GarageBand. That's all I know. I don't know anything else, but Audacity used to really suck. It used to be very, very, very bad, but now it's very, very, very good.
So you got that. And then you got everything you need. Those are the mechanics. Now, after you're done with that, you have to host this thing somewhere because the way the podcast gets out into the world is through something called an RSS feed.
RSS feeds, that stands for Real Simple Syndication, but you've got to have that feed. It's like, if this is my radio station here and you're listening to me via my RSS feed, which is like my tower. It's not my radio tower. That's my RSS feed.
It's nobody else's. I own it. It's mine. You can't have it.
I'm keeping it. Nah, what do you think about that? That's my RSS feed. So you get that out there and you do that.
And uh, so you need hosting. Well, here's where it gets complicated. Because hosting, uh, you know, with your RSS feed, you can, you can pay for hosting. You can do Libsyn.
You can do Buzzsprout. I really like Buzzsprout. I'm not a giant fan of Libsyn, uh, although I knew people who worked there. They're a fine company.
Uh, but, um, you know, there's a bunch of them out there. Uh, Spotify, creators at Spotify.com is a free one. And I have to tell you the quality of it is excellent. As a matter of fact, I upload this podcast to creators at Spotify.com.
I upload it to them all ready to go, but there's a bunch of them out there that you can get that you can get and they will, you know, uh, they will do all kinds of things for you as far as hosting is concerned. They will help you edit and everything else. We'll talk about editing in a second. Uh, and, but essentially now you've covered all the bases.
Now you have everything that you need to start a podcast and that is it. The rest of it is up to you. You've got to decide what you're gonna podcast about, why you're going to podcast about it, and all of that. Then you've got to market the damn podcast.
And I gotta tell you, I have a friend named Katie who has a podcast and they're making about $800,000 a year off of that podcast. I could not believe it. Although I'm not the least bit surprised because Katie is real smart. And here's what I'm going to do in the show notes of this podcast.
I'm going to put a link to a YouTube video where my friend Joe Malacowski, I probably butchered his last name, who I've known for a long time. As a matter of fact, I went to a WordPress class he has 20 years ago. Uh, but he has, he's now known as Mr. Tampa Bay.
He does videos about what's happening in Tampa Bay. And then he does interviews. He did a one hour or so podcast or YouTube channel visit with Katie about her podcast. And Katie opened up.
I mean, I knew that Katie was a pretty transparent person as far as she doesn't hold anything back. If she's going to share something with you, she'll share it all the way. She's just that cool of a person. When I was over at their house, I went to a party over there and a birthday party over at her and her husband Chris's house.
And they now live on a, I think it's a 15, 18 acre farm not far from where the lady, remember the lady that had the tigers and yeah, that lady, not far from where that lady used to live. Uh, but, uh, he had this beautiful piece of