Most computers now come with sound cards and the ability to plug in a microphone and record your voice. Your podcast can be as simple as a spoken introduction with its title, the content, and an ending with a thank you. There is no need for anything more fancy, but you might want to think about a little music for the beginning and the end to give it a more radio-like presentation appeal. Remember to only use music for which you have written approval. It would be best to have a local musician give you approval in writing to take about 20 seconds of their music off a CD or other recording.
A free resource for both hosting and the recording software to place your podcast on the web is MyPodcast.com. In return for the free hosting of the large bandwidth required, there will be an advertisement in your podcast. However, MyPodcast allows you to place a marker where you want the ad to appear, so placing it at the end would probably be best. Once your subscribers are familiar with your format, they can hear all that you want to present and stop before the ad if they want.
If you want to work with music, a really powerful free software solution is WavePad and its utilities. With the unlicensed free version you can edit audio and music files extensively. Mixing files together for voice over music will require a paid upgrade to their MixPad software. A value of the free WavePad is the ability to change the format or file types such as .wav and mp3.
After experimenting for a while, I decided to take a short piece of music, put my voice over it with the introduction to the podcast and save that file as the intro. Then I took another short piece for the ending with voice over for a thank you and invitation to return. By saving that file also, I can grab the intro, tack onto it my podcast recorded content, and then tack on the ending. It's fast and provides a nice result that is consistent with every episode as to beginning and ending.
The MyPodCast Recorder then opens the saved MP3 file and uploads it to my podcast page. It's a blog-like page and allows links, images and comments for those that go to the page rather than downloading into an MP3 player or iPod. MyPodcast also gives instructions as to how to get your podcast accepted into the iTunes Music Store for free download. Here are some example real estate podcast episodes. Other podcast hosting services are in the link box at the end of this article.
Want more info? Here's our Podcast Tutorial & Resources.
