51% of Americans regularly listen to at least one podcast. How do you compete in this market? Increasing your exposure without increasing your workload by much gives your audience more opportunity to find you and YouTube is one of the places people spend the most time on the internet.
We recommend recording and releasing an interesting audio podcast and posting it on YouTube as well, for your audience to find you. But if you’re unsure how to start a podcast on YouTube, then this article is for you.
At ZenCast, as a podcast hosting service and publisher, we’re quite familiar with the ins and outs of podcasting. We have experience providing helpful tools for podcasters that cover everything from website building to podcast uploading.
Why start a podcast on YouTube?
Without question, YouTube is one of the top content platforms on the internet. As a result, many people will be searching for podcasts there. Because of this high volume, you can use YouTube SEO to target a wide range of keywords to bring in more listeners.
How many of your listeners are going to open YouTube absentmindedly and search for your podcast topic? More than you think. With 2.6 bn active users and ¼ of the world’s population using YouTube at least once a month, your audience is almost certainly there.
It doesn’t take much effort to upload your podcast to YouTube, or additional work once you’ve created your audio podcast, so you might as well try it.
Do podcasts cost anything?
You need good equipment. That said, it’s pretty affordable. Podcasters require a high-quality microphone. You can easily find one for under $100 by searching on Amazon.
If you film yourself recording your podcast with a camera as you’re making it, then the cost of a camera and potentially lighting will set you back. You’ll notice that small podcasts don’t start with an elaborate set. You can even post your podcast to YouTube without any footage to accompany it.
There are other bits you need to consider as well. For instance, you could hire an artist to design your podcast thumbnails for YouTube or writers to write a podcast script (just make sure not to lose your personality). If you use a podcasting platform, some of them charge money for a monthly subscription.
How to start an audio podcast on YouTube in 10 steps
We’ll go over the process behind how to record a podcast and post it on YouTube by showing it to you step by step. In general, we can classify these 10 steps into four distinct phases:
Phase one: branding
Involves choosing a topic with an audience and centering your brand around that.
Phase two: tech
Selecting a microphone and potentially a camera too.
Phase three: planning
Getting ready for your first podcast episode and looking for guests.
Phase four: execution
Recording, editing, and uploading the podcast and getting it to your ideal audience.
Phase one: branding
Choose a topic
If you’re searching for how to start a podcast on YouTube, then you probably already have a topic in mind. Just make sure that there is an audience for it. Focus on a key demographic and find out which words they use when they talk about the topic they want to hear about. Websites like Reddit and Quora are great resources to help you find questions that your audience wants someone to answer.
Moreover, you can already set the stage for your YouTube podcast launch campaign at this point. You could choose to post on Twitter, Medium, or whatever other content platforms you think your audience hangs out. Start building a following there to market your podcast to them later.
Create a brand
Before you can truly finalize your podcast, you need to create your brand. Choose a name that’s memorable and communicates what you want your brand to be. Make sure that the name is fewer than 5 words long. If you’re starting a business podcast, you might want to use SEO to search for an appropriate name.
Cover art is also a crucial part of your brand. After all, it’s the first thing that many of your potential listeners will see. If you aren’t the artistic type, you can easily pay some freelance artist to create a piece of cover art that matches your energy and brand. Here are a few cover examples below.
Phase two: tech
Buy a good quality microphone
Have you ever listened to a podcast with low-quality audio? It ruins the whole experience and probably makes you want to stop listening. 80% of podcast listeners listen to podcasts the whole way through. Don’t let your listeners become part of the 20%.
When choosing a microphone, Omar El Takrori recommends purchasing one that has a rich, radio-like sound. After you’ve purchased one, you’ll have to set it up. Look at user reviews and follow online guides to support yourself throughout this process.
One more tip, if you have any guests on, make sure that they all have decent microphones. There’s nothing worse than listening to clean audio from the host and then hearing a guest that sounds like he’s calling in from the middle of a snowstorm.
Buy a good quality camera (optional)
You probably don’t need this at the beginning, but you might feel the need to upload video podcasts since you’re posting to YouTube. If so, you shouldn’t use the webcam on your laptop. The “Zoom” video conferencing look went out of style long ago. Instead, pick a high-quality camera you can rely on for years of podcasting.
As you’re putting your podcast on video, you might as well create a nice background too. At the very least, tidy up some space in the room where you film the podcast. People will pay attention to your background the whole time. Costly purchases like lighting and sets can wait for later. Do find a cheap lighting solution early on, however. It will drastically improve the quality of your footage.
Phase three: planning
Plan your first episodes
With a lot of the preliminary work out of the way, you can create the foundations for your actual podcasts. Experiment during your first few episodes. It won’t be long before you create a defined template for your script. For instance, you could open every podcast like this:
“Hi everyone, my name is {{Your Name}} and welcome to {{Your Podcast}} where {{Podcast Tagline}}. Today, we’re going to talk about {{Episode Topic}} with {{Special Guest}}...”
You get the idea. Rearrange this to suit your podcast if need be. The most important element here is the tagline. A catchy, memorable tagline is far more effective than any cover art or even podcast name.
Look For guests
Once you’ve established a vision for your podcast, plus a bit of an online presence beforehand, you can begin reaching out to guests. Cold messaging tactics like email, LinkedIn, and Twitter DMs are all in play.
You might feel like your creativity is enough and you don’t need guests. However, you should consider that podcast guests are a great way to do a little cross-promotion. If people want to hear from your guest, then they’ll be dying to check your podcast out to hear them. To hold their interest, here are a few podcast interview questions to ask during the podcast.
Phase four: execution
Record the first podcast
Once you record the first podcast, you’ll get a feel for how podcasting really is. Use a mirror and keep it in front of you while you record. Seeing your reflection will help keep your voice more lively.
In the beginning, just get used to the recording process and be yourself. One thing that many novice podcasters fail to do is talk directly into the mic, but don’t be too hard on yourself if you make any mistakes.
Edit the first podcast
After you’re done recording, you’re ready to edit your first podcast. That might sound complex, but it’s usually just a matter of making sure everything came out right in the recording and taking out the parts where you’re rambling. Plenty of free audio editors exist, like Audacity.
If you’ve included a video element, you might want to edit it a bit if you don’t like the lighting. But otherwise, you can’t cut random parts of it out because you still need your lips to sync with the audio.
Upload your podcast
The longer your podcast, the longer it takes to upload. To post the podcast video on YouTube, you’ll also need a conversion tool to transform the audio file into a video format.
Advertise your podcast
We mentioned this earlier, but once you’ve started putting out your first episodes, this is where your advertising efforts shine. Hopefully, you’ve built up a bit of an audience on social media beforehand. If not, that’s OK too.
To take advantage of SEO on YouTube, you might want to conduct some keyword research before naming the title of the episode and choosing a topic. That way, you’ll get some nice organic search volume on your podcast videos.
If you want to take further advantage of SEO, you could always use ZenCast to build your podcast website. We offer you tools to help your website load quickly, and you get full advantage of our built-in SEO credentials.
Build your audience through YouTube, but do this to overcome its downsides
One of the things that makes YouTube great is how accessible it is. However, as long term YouTubers will tell you, you should always look to build an audience on a platform you control as well. As with any algorithm-driven platform, on YouTube you risk losing your audience whenever the algorithm changes. The ideal model is having listeners find you on YouTube and then visit your website. ZenCast helps you make this a reality, not someday. Today!.
Create your podcast’s website through ZenCast. You can use a custom domain and the website will be 100% yours. We don’t insert any ads into your content. Plus, we don’t have any upload or download limits. To get your SEO straight from the beginning.
Sign up today and start posting podcasts to your own website.