Have you seen that guy on YouTube that does the where you should be shopping and what you should buy? And he starts with these are the five things that you need to be buying at Costco this week. I'm stealing this from him. Okay.
These are the top 10 things that you need to do to start a podcast. How's that? Number one concept. What are you going to podcast about?
You have to decide that in advance. You have to know what you're going to do, when you're going to do it, how you're going to do it. What is the reason for your podcast? That's going to take some time.
You're going to want a yellow pad to write all this stuff down with. All right, we're gonna go through this stuff relatively quickly because there's just so much to cover. So you have that down. What's the next thing you do?
Okay. There's a lot of these things that are in this list that you don't possibly have to do. But number two, you've got to do. You got to get a microphone.
You want a high quality microphone. Now you can spend 70 bucks on a microphone. The Samsung Q2U, I think it is. I have one in a case down there on the floor.
Excellent microphone to start with. You can plug it right into your computer if you want to. Or if you want to spend a little money, spend $100 and get a Rode PodMic. But if you get the Rode PodMic, you've got to have an audio interface unless you spend an extra $100 and you can spend $200 and get a Rode PodMic USB.
And that's what I'm speaking to you on right now. You can plug that right into your computer or into the number three thing that you might want to consider getting, but you don't have to. Okay, if you're going to use the Rode PodMic or that Samsung, you can plug both of those right into your computer and you can record from there. It's that simple.
But if you want to step it up a notch, you want an audio interface or a mixer. I use something called the Rodecaster Pro Duo. It has two microphone outlets. There's a Rodecaster Pro 2 that has four microphone outlets if you're going to have that many people.
I don't need that many people and I want the real estate on my desk to be smaller. So I have this and it's excellent. It's the best damn thing I've got. I love it.
But you don't need it. Okay. Number four, what you need. You need good quality headphones.
And I'm talking about closed back headphones. So right now I've got mine on. I'm speaking into this microphone and I can hear everything. If I had a guest on the other side of the table, I could hear them breathing if I, you know, I could hear everything and you want to monitor that while you do it.
So you need good headphones to do that. That you're either plugging into your computer or you're plugging into your audio interface. Or in the case of like that Samsung Q2U, you can plug it directly into the microphone and you get instant, you can hear it instantly. So get some good headphones.
Spend at least 50 bucks. I got Sennheisers on here, which are more expensive, but over on the other side of the desk, I've got Audio-Technicas, which are about 50 or 60 bucks and I like them better, but they need new pads and I haven't replaced the pads yet. So they're just sitting over there. But the Sennheisers are good.
Anyway, spend 50 bucks, get some good headphones. The next thing you need, recording and editing software. Now you can spend a lot of money. You can spend a little money or you can spend no money.
I suggest that you spend no money and use Audacity. It's free. You can download it off the interwebs and it works just fine. There's lots of tutorials on YouTube on how to use it.
And I know people who have very large podcasts who use Audacity. I used Adobe Audition for years and years and years. When I bought this audio interface, I stopped using it because everything is on board here with the Rodecaster and I don't need that software. So I use Audacity in case I screw up and need to, you know, snip something out.
But Audacity is wonderful and it's free. Okay, number six, a hosting platform. In other words, once you record these things, you got to put them somewhere and there's lots of them out there that you can do. Libsyn is probably the biggest one.
Podbean is another one. Really good one, as a matter of fact. And Spotify for podcasters is there. It's free, by the way, and it works really, really well.
So just look into that. Next thing you need, don't skimp on this. Although on The Daily Grateful, we skimped on it. Well, not really.
My favorite ex-wife took a stone and she painted on it. She said, thedailygrateful.com. And I said, Oh, that is so cool. And we took a picture of it with my iPhone on grass.
And then I size it up. And that's my cover art. Now when I was doing the gardening one, Home and Garden Radio, I paid somebody on Fiverr to create a really cool album cover. All right, the album cover.
When anybody goes to download your podcast, first thing they're going to see is this cover art and that's going to drive people to you. So make sure you do good on that. Okay. Intro and outro music.
You heard my intro music as we started this thing, unless I forgot to do it. I forgot to do it. I didn't play my intro music. Oh, gosh, let's play it right now.
That's the intro music. Okay, and you need to own your intro music. You got to own it. So in other words, you've got to buy it from somebody.
Royalty free music. I have all of my music made by a guy by the name of Mike Stewart, who's a Nashville musician. And I have the rights to it. Don't think for one moment that you can take a Beatles song and use that as your opening music because you cannot.
Bad things will happen if you do. So don't do that. Pay for good intro and outro music. The intro music is very important because when I start a podcast, people hear that and they know the podcast is starting.
And that's really good. I'm so excited. I just started today and didn't use it, but I'll let you hear it. All right, so there you go.
Number nine, website or social media presence. At the very least, a Facebook page or a page or whatever, or a website, very, very, very least. Now, your hosting company, the people that host your podcast, most of them will give you a free website. That's part of the deal.
So that's pretty good. Or you may want to take it up a notch and design and create your own website. The next thing you want to do, and probably most important, is you want to register with all of the directories and all of the people that will play your podcast like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You used to be able to do Google Podcasts, but they don't exist anymore.
But I'm on several of those things that are carrying my podcast. You know, Apple Podcasts probably being the biggest, but Spotify being the second biggest. But you want to register for those and there's lots of ways to learn how to do that. And again, I will talk about the closing music.
This is my closing music. And what the closing music does is it lets people know that you're wrapping up. You've crystallized all of their thoughts and now you're taking them out and you're giving your last thoughts about the subject. So that's the top 10 things that you need to start with.
There's a million more and we'll come up with that next Thursday. We'll cover something specific. Tomorrow is Friday. We will see you then.