A reader and subscriber to the Duct Tape Marketing podcast asked me recently to reveal the tools, techniques and software I use to create, edit and publish my podcast. My system is hacked together through a couple of years of trial and error and is by no means the textbook way to podcast, but like most of what I do it’s simple and practical. So here’s an under the hood look at the Duct Tape Marketing podcast.

Recording

All of my episodes are recorded phone conversations. This presents a real quality challenge as phone lines don’t produce good audio signals. I tested a few solutions and landed on a decidedly low tech approach at the suggestion of a radio station technician.

Using a very retro cool Blue Snowball USB mic and WireTap Studio software I place the guest on speaker mode, lay the mic down by the phone, hit record and conduct the interview. My voice and that of the guest are captured directly into the recording software as an mp3 file. (Audiophiles may be cringing at the sound of this, but it produces decent quality, level sound between my voice and the guest, and eliminates a couple steps in the process.)

Editing

On a Mac I have found that Garage Band does a nice job. (Audacity is a great PC option) In Garage Band I can add the sponsor messages, music clips from a library and edit anything out of the recorded interview. Once I’m happy with the results I export to iTunes and convert back to mp3 format. This seems to produce a nice balance between audio quality and file size.

Publishing

Since mp3 files can get pretty big and benefit from a media server for streaming I use Libsyn to host and stream my files. I get all the bandwidth I need (even with thousands of downloads per episode) for less than $10 per month.

I use a blog created just for the podcast to post show notes and publish the RSS feed. I’m moving this to a WordPress blog eventually and have heard nice things about PodPress for this function.

Promoting

You must make sure that your podcast is listed in iTunes and that people can easily subscribe. I would also suggest seeking out and submitting your feed to a host of podcast directories.

There you have it, my podcasting secrets laid bare. Any other podcasters out there care to share their podcasting success secrets?