This is a presentation I gave at the Long Beach Podcast Meetup on Feb 17, 2010

In this episode of Podcast Cookbook, I show you how to get web hosting for your show. I provide specific web hosting companies that I use and show you how to sign up.

In this episode of Podcast Cookbook, I show you how to get a domain name for your show.

In this video, I discuss how important picking the right topic is for the success of your show and go through the key factors for picking the right topic.

There are a number of great video editing tools available for both the PC and the Mac.

On the PC, my favorite is Sony Vegas. It does just about everything you need and it’s very affordable. It handles HD video and audio production tasks with ease and produces professional level video. It’s easy to use and learn. It has wizards to import and export projects so that you can get started quickly.

The program is chock full of Show Me How interactive tutorials that help you learn to use the software quickly. The Show Me How tutorials make it easy to complete a project step-by-step.

On the Mac, the king of video production software is Final Cut. It’s kind of expensive, but it’s great software if you are really serious about producing the highest quality video.

Audacity is tool for recording and editing audio files. It’s a free program that can be used to edit your audio files and to clip together audio files. The software is used by many podcasters and is a great product for editing your audio files.

You can download Audacity at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/

Here’s a short video from YouTube showing you how to use Audacity.

If you are interested in making a screen cast, you will need the right software to make it work. I have tried free software for this and it will work. The trouble is the free software is harder to use and produces much poorer quality results.

My strong recommendation for anyone who wants to make a screen cast is to use a software tool called Camtasia Studio. It’s easy to use, it works great and it will save you lots and lots of time. The price is about $300, but it’s really worth it. If you can’t afford that and you have lots of time to work on this, then you can try the free software option CamStudio. Camtasia and CamStudio are NOT the same thing. They totally different products.

If you want a great looking screen cast I strongly recommend Camtasia (aff). It gives you all the tools you need to capture the screen cast with audio, edit the end result so it looks the way you want it and then encodes the files to be used in just about any format you will need.

Here’s a video of Camtasia in action:

One of the most important steps to marketing your podcast is to register and promote your podcast within the main podcast directories. Registering in these podcast directories will almost instantly give you link backs to your podcast website. More importantly, the big search engines crawl these directories really quickly. I have seen podcast submissions that turn up in the search engines overnight.

There is a long list of directories below. Start at the top and work your way through the list. You will need the URL of your podcast and information like the title and description of your podcast. Make sure your description is as comprehensive as possible, because that’s how the search engines will find your podcast.

If anyone asks you to pay skip that directory.  All the listings should be free.

I would start with these directories as I think they tend to be the top ranked sites in the search engines.

• Digital Podcast
• Podcast Alley
• Podcast Pickle
• Podcast.com
• Podcast.net (link seems broken right now)
• Podcasting News (link seems broken right now)
• Digg for Podcasts
• Podfeed.net
• Podcast Directory

There is a long list of other directories you can submit to over at Podcast411 and you may also want to try PodPusher to get to an even longer list of directories.

iTunes is one of the most important podcast directories and it’s not always easy to figure out how to publish your podcast up to iTunes so it gets included in the iTunes podcast directory.

Here’s a video about how to make this work.

I recommend that anyone who wants to set up a podcast consider using Wordpress as your podcast publishing tool. It has built in podcasting support and is really easy to use. It’s also free. Just install Wordpress and enable the Podpress plugin and you will have full podcast support for your podcast. You enter your title, show notes, and provide the address of your podcast files. Hit the publish button and Wordpress will post your podcast and automatically set up your podcast RSS feed.

If you set up your hosting at Dreamhost(aff) then you can use their one click install to get your Wordpress set up fast and easy. Here’s a video of setting up Wordpress using the one click install process and how to change the look of the site.

And here’s a video of how to set up your Wordpress to support podcasts. Note: you don’t have to upload the Podpress plugin as it was included in your one click install.