“Audit your time to determine the low-value tasks that are sucking your energy. Then you transfer those tasks to someone who’s better at them and enjoys them.”
-- Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time
TL:DR -- I won't bury the lead: you can podcast for under $100 a year!
Don’t believe me?
Here. I’ll show you how.
Starting with your idea, you can do all your design and prep work yourself. I assume you already have a laptop computer, which means you can download your recording software for free and even create your show art using free online graphics tools.
Next, your first expense comes when you buy a microphone that will get the job done – say a $60 microphone that you can use with a USB connection.
Good so far?
Once you have everything downloaded and set up, you take your preparation work and use it to record your first podcast episode. When you like what you have you export it as an *.MP3.
You’re halfway there!
With one episode you need to host it. Again, you go to the Internet and find a cloud service that will give you a storage bucket like Google, Amazon, or Akamai. You place your MP3 in that storage bucket, make it public, and now the world can access it.
If they only knew where it was.
Wait! They can with your very own RSS feed!
If you find the right documentation, you can then open up a text editor and create your very own RSS feed, fill in all the correct metadata tags, point your enclosure tag to the public location of your episode’s .MP3 file, save it to your cloud storage bucket with the *.RSS file extension, and Bob’s your Uncle – you have a podcast! The total of that Google storage bucket is somewhere in the neighborhood of free to $0.01 a month.
Not bad.
Now you need a website. With a quick search of domain names, you find the one that works for your podcast and register it for one year. If you go with a company like Namecheap, that domain name should cost you less than $15.
Okay. We have around $25 left over for website hosting.
Fortunately, we don’t need anything fancy like WordPress. With a little more research you can learn some simple tricks to building your first static website using JavaScript and HTML for free. Because it’s a static website you can host that site for free too. However, we’re going to need a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificate (that’s the HTTPS that Google likes to see) so we might need a real website hosting plan. The good news is you can get it for less than $5.00 from companies like HostGator or Netlify. All you need to do now is register your podcast with all the big directories and wait for all the listeners to roll in.
What’s the other $20 for? If your podcast gets popular, your storage bucket might get pricey and cost you upwards of $5.00 a month! That might be a nice problem to have. That extra money could also be used to buy coffee that you could use to create new episodes.
This is essentially the path to build your own DIY podcast under $100.
Now, you might be asking yourself, “Self? Why don’t I just do podcasting myself and cut out the middleman?”
Excellent question.
The truth is you can. The reality is that it will require you to take some time to learn cloud architecture, software engineering, networking, web design, web development, and security, in addition to podcasting, audio editing, vocal skills, and researching your topics – at a minimum.
It only took me 20 years so I’m sure you’ll get it in no time!
And many of the lessons are not fun.
Okay, all kidding aside, there is a lot of work that goes into the pancake batter and baling wire that holds the podcasting ecosystem together. Without a doubt, you can do everything in podcasting for pennies. However, you’re going to be bad at most of it for a long, long time without trading your time for a good amount of experience.
This is why many podcasters pay someone else to do most of the heavy lifting. They are trading their money for time. Yes, free software and services can get you into the game but they often lack features that would have saved you time. It is also true that you can host your own media files but you will most likely have to go up a steep learning curve just to save a few dollars.
Again, all the technical tasks in podcasting are doable so long as you trade your time for understanding. After trying to do it all myself, I’ve learned that some podcasting services are worth the money because they allow me to buy back some of my time. I pay for good audio editing software, media hosting, and remote recording tools. Everything else I do myself after trading my time for experience.
My advice is you should learn everything about how your podcast works first. Everything. Then, once you understand all its complexities, only pay for what you suck at or don’t enjoy doing.
It will save you a lot of time.
🤠☕
Oncetold is a podcast education and technology company. We turn new podcasters into yarn weavers, big dreamers, and true believers. Start telling your story at oncetold.us.
Find more podcasting wisdom on Not Easily Squished or at noteasilysquished.com.