There are 4 elements you need to start a podcast in 2016. Let’s talk about starting a podcast as easily as possible.

Podcasting continues to grow its listener base and podcasting is a great way to get your voice out there. A lot has changed since I started my first series on how to start a podcast fast back in 2000. I therefore want to do an updated series for you guys and show you step-by-step, how to go from nothing to having a podcast running and being available for download as quickly and as easily as possible.

Hi, I’m Ryan from podcastfast.com and I run a myriad of podcasts.  I think it is about five or six different ones now. I go through this process quite often, because whenever I have a passion project I’m working on, I generally want to start a podcast for it. So, what I’m going to do (let me first apologize for my very poor drawing skills) is I m just going to lay out the elements that you’re going to need for your podcast.

The first thing that you are going to need is some form of audio recording.  This is your mp3 file –  this is you talking – this is in essence your podcast. And everything else we do is getting people to be able to listen to or to download this audio recording.  In order for people to access this audio recording we need something that’s called an audio host. An audio host is a service where you put your file on there and people all over the world can now download your file.

What you do therefore is, you upload your audio recording to the audio host and then people all over the world will be able to download it. You could do it on your own computer and set up p2p file-sharing but that’s very difficult and you’re not going to reach a large audience. The way most people consume podcasts is on iTunes and Stitcher Radio.

For that reason, we need to be on those platforms and so we’re going to need an audio host. This is different from a web host. They specify in hosting audio.  It is a lot cheaper. If you try and do a web host you are likely going to bring down the service if you get decent numbers to your podcast.  Therefore, after an audio host, this next step is optional but highly recommended, that is, to have your own website. A website will be where you can post your podcast, you can post blog post, and you can do a whole bunch of different things.  What I advise and will show you is how to take the file that you’ve uploaded to your audio host and get it on your website.

The last step in the process is getting into places like iTunes and Stitcher Radio and other places like that.  This is the last step in the process and this works a bit different. What we’re doing is we’re actually telling iTunes to go ahead and look at our website to get our audio from there. So we are not uploading anything to iTunes. iTunes is pulling all of it from our website and just playing it through what’s called an RSS feed which is quite confusing but I’ll explain it and make it simple for you.

The reason you can skip this website path is you can actually get iTunes to pull the RSS feed directly from your audio host so we can have that as the RSS feed as well. However, if you do that there are going to be some limitations with the audio host. For example, show notes will be harder to do and also something that a lot of people don’t think about when they’re starting because they are trying to save money or something like that is what is called Redirection.

Let’s say that for one reason or another I want to leave this audio host and go to another audio host, you can’t just say in iTunes, “Okay I’ve moved my audio host somewhere else or my RSS feed somewhere else go and look there.” You actually have to do it at the audio host level in order to redirect this RSS to tell iTunes that actually we’re not going here anymore,