Podcasts are the upcoming or to an extent one of the essential part of the blogs. Not only it helps you in reaching a wider audience, which doesn’t prefer to read stuff, it also helps in getting more personal to your readers. Podcasts are generally classified in to section - Audio Podcasts & Video Podcasts (referred as VideoCasts). In this post we are specifically working on Audio Podcasts.

There are various ways through which you can create professional podcasts, however we are going to talk about the tools which are free and are simple to use.

Tools to help you create a podcast :

1. Record the podcast using Audacity : Audacity is a free and open source audio editor and recorder and lets you easily create the podcasts. It’s cross platform as well and is available for Windows, Mac & Linux too. It’s one of the simplest and free tool and one of the highest rated product.

2. Intro Music : In order to ensure that your podcast sounds professional, you should include intro music and in order to get royalty free music loops you can browse around FlashKit Loops and find the music of your taste.

3. Skype comes to the party : If you are interested in doing interviews with people then Skype can be a wonderful software which will help you in recording the conversation although you need the right plugins for that. Call Graph is a wonderful extra for Skype and is completely free too. Josh Owens has covered various tools through which you can record the skype conversations although they are paid ones. The comments area of Josh’s post is also a handy resource.

Where to upload the podcast ?

1. Odeo : A free and a trusted site where you can upload your podcasts. It lets you put the podcasts on your blogs easily through the embed code. In simple terms, it’s YouTube of podcasts.

2. DivShare : Without a doubt one of the best file hosting/sharing service on the internet. It allows you to upload audio files and the flash player lets you embed the files on your blog too.

3. Your own host : You can of course use your own web hosting space and bandwidth. Although, as your podcast will get popular you’ll need to invest more in hosting as the bandwidth gets consumed like crazy. You can use PodPress plugin to integrate the audio player in WordPress, so that simple upload of the MP3 file will do the work for you.

These are some of the must have tools without which making podcast won’t be an easy task and because they are free to use, so the fun gets doubled. Happy Podcasting!