Podcasting has never been more popular than it is right now. Every week I interview female entrepreneurs on my show Financial Fluency, and more and more often those entrepreneurs either already have their own show or ask me questions about how to get started with a show of their own. Here are my top 5 tools that I use for my podcast.
1. Podbean
This is the host for my podcast. When I was doing the All The Stuff Podcast with Lisa Sharp and Lisa Carpenter, we tried Libsyn which is great as well, but when that podcast ended, I decided to stay with Podbean for my solo show because it performs all of the functions I need and is a little less expensive per month.
2. The Blue Yeti Microphone
My husband and I have a recording studio for our record label at home, so it isn’t like I don’t have a lot of other vocal and instrumental mics, but when I started by podcast I went ahead and invested in getting the Blue Yeti mic to be used only for my podcast.
I love this mic. It sounds great, it is easy to adjust, and it has its own lovely built in stand so you don’t need to mess around with mini mic stands on the desk or anything. It also legitimized my podcast as an important thing that I do each and every week and my equipment is always there, standing ready.
3. Garage Band
Once again, we have a recording studio so I could have used the big studio and equipment there, but because I podcast so regularly, I never wanted a band recording in the other room to mean that I didn’t get to do my podcast that day, so I hopped onto Garage Band – the free program that came with my Mac, and found it to be more than sufficient for my podcast recording needs.
Now that my podcast is all interviews due to overwhelming demand, I use zoom for all recordings and only edit in Garage Band occasionally. I love how zoom automatically gives you the audio track as well as the video.
Unless something went drastically wrong with the sound at some point in the show, I just use Garage band to top and tail the show with my intro and ending and leave everything else exactly the way it recorded in the first place.
4. Acuity Scheduler
Because I book so many guests onto my show these days, I needed a scheduler that would not only tell them when I had openings in my schedule, I also needed it to collect information from them for me.
Early on, before I got my podcast process in place, I kept running into delays when I couldn’t find a head shot for a guest or had to go look up their social media profile links myself.
Now, no one gets booked onto my show without first filling out a form in acuity where I get their bio, headshot, a bit of back story, their book or program titles and all of their social media and other relevant links.
This means that I can sit down 10-15 minutes before each interview, review the one sheet in my acuity scheduler, write down a few questions and be ready to go when they hop on Zoom with me!
5. eClincher
This is my current favorite for scheduling social media content. I feel like eClincher is a cross between Social Sprout and Edgar. It has both the smart inbox that lets you monitor and respond to DMs and comments across all your different social media accounts.
It also has repeating social media queues so you can fill a queue with all of the episodes of your podcast and have them feed out into your Twitter account a couple of times per day.
You can also schedule one-time posts for things you don’t want to repeat over and over. It looks a little AOL in the 90’s in terms of layout and design, but the functionality is fantastic.
These are the 5 main tools that I use to run my podcast.
There are definitely other options for all of these, here is a list of other hosting sites, but having some kind of host like Podbean, some kind of mic to speak into, some kind of audio editing program where you can edit out audio disasters and add on your intro and ending, the scheduling system can happen live by going back and forth in email with different days and times, but a scheduling program like Acuity really helps a lot.
And for social media sharing of your episodes, again you can do this by hand, but having an app where you can schedule the posts really helps a lot to make sure that you consistently share out every episode. I can’t wait to hear your new podcast!
Jen Turrell is the host of the Financial Fluency podcast, a special needs mom and a financial personal trainer for women working outside of the traditional 9 to 5. You can find her at jenturrell.com.