Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
So, the last two articles have looked at the hardware and software needed to get started in the podcast world. In this article, we look at your options for getting your audio out to the listening public, and how to go about this.
My first solo podcast was via Hacker Public Radio (HPR), and I would recommend that anyone dipping their toes into the world of podcasting to use this as the medium for getting their first shows out into the wild. The great thing about HPR is that the topic can be about virtually anything as long as it doesn’t infringe anyone else's rights to the content. So, playing copyright music is not allowed but the playing of creative commons music is, as long as you credit the content as required by the licence. If you have recorded your content, it takes about 15 minutes: • Request a slot on the upload page. • Fill out the form on the submission page by answering several questions and composing a few show notes. • They then request that you upload the audio as a high-quality .flac file. • Press submit and let your audio upload.
If successful, you have just submitted your first podcast to HPR. More details on their requirements can be found on the Contribute page, and a HPR show on the whole process can be found at http://hackerpublicradio.org/eps.php?id=2939
Another quick way to get your audio out to an audience is via social media; Alan Pope of the Ubuntu Podcast has recently started to use the Telegram application on his mobile phone to post what he has titled a ‘TeleCast with popey’, and has about 500 followers of this channel. For Alan, this was a great way for him to be able to post short audio clips of his thoughts at a particular moment in time, and record and publish them directly via Telegram. It has to be said that Alan is already well known in the community, and has many followers through his podcasts and multiple other social media outlets, so he already had an audience, but his experience of doing this has shown that it is possible to start a podcast of sorts with the Telegram and other similar applications that have this functionality.
OK, that has demonstrated that you can get your audio out onto the internet for others to listen to, and, in the case of HPR, this will be sent to people’s pod-catches if they are subscribed to the HPR RSS feed, as, although they may not know of you yet, they subscribe to all the shows that HPR puts out each week. In this way, you are guaranteed that some will listen to your show. Other services exist – some of which offer a free or paid option to host your podcast. A new one I have just been made aware of is Anchor (https://anchor.fm/) – which aims to be the YouTube of podcasting, allowing podcasters to be both hosted for free and share in money made from advertising around their content. You will have to make your own mind up if this is a valid option for your podcasting endeavour.
So now let's look at how you might create a custom site on the internet. With your own site, you can manage your own web presence, make it look the way you want, and host your audio (or a link to it) and RSS feed. There are many services that provide free hosting of a web/blog site. The most common two for a new user are ‘WordPress’ and the one that I use for the ‘Distrohoppers Digest’ site, ‘Blogger’, which, if you have a Google account, you already have access to. There are many tutorials on the net for creating a WordPress site, but, to keep it simple, I am going to talk about my personal experience of setting up a Blogger site, getting Feedburner to push the feed to pod-catchers and even displaying your logo along with the feed.
The first thing you need to think about is do you want to create a separate email account with the name of the Podcast, or are you happy to use an account you already hold? Personally, my suggestion would be a dedicated address and site; that way, if there are more than one of you involved in the show, you can share access to the account without compromising any personal information, although google may require a link account to verify your identity, anyone with access to the show account, will not have access to the account you used during the setup process. In my case, when I created the new account for my podcast, the email: distrohoppersdigest@gmail.com was available, and we created a new account using this address.
If you have created a Google account, then, in the top right of your google page, there is a grid of 9 squares next to the username; if you click this, several Icons appear, if one of these is the Blogger icon, you can use this to access your new blogger account; if the Blogger icon is not visible, click on the word ‘more’ at the bottom and it will be somewhere among the other icons. Although, in my experience, it is generally in the first set. So navigate to the Blogger page, and, if this is a new account, and you haven't yet created any posts, you will be presented with a menu of options on the left of the screen that is just titles, the top one being posts. Above that should be something that says your blogs or create a blog as, at the moment, you haven't got any blog’s created. Note you can have multiple blogs associated with each Google account, so, if you are planning to start several different podcasts, you could in theory use the same email. If planning to do this from the start, before creating the email address, you will want something more generic that can be used for more than one show.
Although as you get 15GB of free drive storage for each email account it can be handy to have separate accounts for each podcast as you can use this for storing your audio archive – if only temporally. So, you have created a Blogger (Google) account; now you need to decide on the title for your new podcast and create your Blog for this.
On the Blogger home page, click the ‘create new blog’ box, and you will be presented with a setup screen. Give your Blog a title and choose a theme; don’t worry if you change your mind later, you can change the blogs style in the settings menu on the left of the screen after you create your blog.
You now have a Blog and can create a post, and it will appear on your blog for all to see.
So this month we have covered posting your audio to both Telegram, HPR and Anchor. We have also started the process of setting up your own Blog site where you can create your own dedicated Podcast pages, with both your show notes, links to your audio for downloading, and, as we will look at in future articles, an RSS feed to push your audio directly to people’s pod-catchers as you publish new content. See you next Month