 Here's everything you need to know about how to start a podcast for beginners for free. Hello, I'm Neil and I'm a beginner too. I launched the Great British YouTubers podcast and that's a video podcast right here on YouTube but now I've hit the stage where I want to turn that into an audio podcast and I'm going to do that from scratch in real time right here. It's a tutorial where I make all the mistakes along the way so you can just follow my journey. It's going to be quite a long video I think. I'm going to put time codes in the description so you can jump forward. To create my podcast I'm going to use this site here anchor.fm. They are a podcast host so it's a bit like YouTube in that it puts all the things you need in one place. It is possible to create a podcast without using a podcast host. I did it but I really don't recommend it. It is really difficult so that's why I'm using anchor for this. At the end of this video you and me will have a podcast out of this trust me. The first thing you need to do is I put the top of the screen here. You can see sign up and log in. Now obviously we're going to sign up so if I click on this anchor.fm only wants three things. They want a full name, an email address and for you to create a password. This is the first obstacle. I would not recommend using your personal email address. The way that podcasts seem to work is that you need to have a very public email address attached to your podcast series and I don't think that I'm quite ready to have a personal email address put out on the internet attached to this podcast and I don't think you do too. The only way to stay safe I think is to create an email address that does not have all of your personal information on so I'm going to do that now. If you go to google.com and click on sign in there's an option at the bottom which is create account and it gives you two options and nobody knows which one to go for for myself or to manage my business. I just want it for a podcast so you know it's not really a business but I'm going to go for to manage my business and there's some details to fill in your first name and I would suggest you would want to put something that looks good publicly so let's call it my super awesome podcast and then create a password and then hit next. Now we can go back to anchor and put those details in and then you put in your new email address and then think up a password prove you're not a robot and then hit sign up this is exciting. There's a warning before you can publish any episodes you'll need to verify your email address with anchor so that's a good job I set that up and when you click on the verification code in the email you get email verified and then you have to log in again and now we are into the dashboard the main dashboard and they lay it out really nicely this is what it looks like in 2020 and 2021 so let's follow the nice trail that they've laid out for us make your first episode if you click on let's do it it opens up the making a podcast episode dashboard and you have four really big buttons to press the first is record see we could record a podcast right now within the anchor website you can add voice messages from listeners and there's a library where you can reuse your previously uploaded audio I'm not sure we're going to need any of that for now because I've already made the audio file I just need to get it up as a podcast series so the next option is set up your podcast choose a name and cover up for your podcast and it says that you can change this later so anchor.fm says before we can distribute your podcast to additional listening platforms you need to fill in a few things now I don't know whether to put it as capitals or not what do you think leave a comment below so I'm going to call it great British youtubers podcast podcast description now I've got one of these written already and I'll just pull that over from my youtube podcast series I'm Neil Mossy a development producer with a mission to learn from vloggers creators and youtubers from around the world then anchor.fm asks you to choose a podcast category I'll scroll down these ones so you can see what's on offer but I think I'm going to go for education and how to because we're getting lots of advice from the guests and the language under English they have all these different variations of English like Canada, Ireland, Australia and United Kingdom but I just think it's safer to just call it English continue we have three options from anchor.fm search for a photo upload an image and choose one for me if you go to search for a photo anchor offer these generic pictures I'm not going to choose one of those for now upload an image this is where you can upload some cover arts that you've already made and then third option is choose one for me I couldn't do it I couldn't make a picture like this they're great they look like my laptop screen is scratched I'll just put that in for now oh so it was a background which means you can choose a font I like a big fat font so I'm going for Saucon Pro Black and you can change the color of the text that looks good you can align it left center or right I'm going to make some cover arts of my own I just haven't done it yet so I'm going to go with this for now so that has updated my podcast settings page so we've got about your podcast there's a title that you can change at any time a podcast description where you have 600 characters and some podcast cover art is your content clean or explicit mine is soapy clean family fun there's a custom url which has 25 characters I'm going to call my gbyt podcast great british youtubers podcast profile color you can choose a color for your profile and here are all the social connections so I'm going to put my youtube channel Neil Mosse so let's go back up and hit save that's looking quite nice isn't it and there's an option here to view public sites if I click on that this is how the great british youtubers podcast looks and look down here there's a link to the youtube channel so if I click on that oh that's not so good so it doesn't seem to connect to personalized urls because I've had to use my special channel code which is a surprise but that's okay it works that's the main thing the next thing we need to do is to add an episode to the series upload the very first episode there is one very big button at the top of the screen new episode and the button opens up this dashboard we saw earlier there are four options there and on the right hand side this is a column where your episode is assembled and it says here click to upload or drag files here and all we need to do is to drag this audio file into the column on the right hand side there in the dashboard so now it's uploading this audio file into this create your episode while that's uploading you can create a whole podcast show just from within this browser you've got all these options here like record upload like music beds and you just drag them into this column on the right hand side I prefer to make my episodes myself and I just needed a podcast host to just have somewhere to put those audio files there you can see the episode is 100% uploaded there's a nice musical notation icon waiting for me and three dots just click the three dots so you can oh wow you can edit the audio and I can download the audio file or I can remove this audio file from my episode let's click on edit audio see what that does wow look it's turned my audio file into something completely editable my audio files are good to go as episodes but if I needed to make any changes and to cut anything out I can do that with the audio editor so I have my audio file in the episode builder that's all I need for the episode so I click on the save episode button what do you want to call this episode I've got this I hit paste I've got a description already written as well I'm pasting it over and it's removed all of the carriage returns I've got to put those back in if you are any good html you could which is the code people use for writing websites you can switch to html up here and this shows you all of the code for the layout interestingly it has kept all of the code from my pasting over from youtube this is exactly how I want the episode description to look and I have two options now I can either save this episode as a draft and if I hit publish now I can actually set a time I can schedule a time for this podcast episode to be released I can upload new episode art I can add a season number and an episode number I can also tell anchor fm if this episode is a full episode or a trailer or a bonus episode and also you can click on the explicit language warning so season number one episode number one and for episode arts I'm not going to use the series art I do have a thumbnail for this it's not great but it's something to put on for now shall I do it shall I hit publish boom and it's brought up this extra window finished setting up your podcast before we can distribute your podcast to additional listening platforms you need to fill in a few things hit continue ready to distribute your podcast so I'm going to hit cross for no update cover art I'm going to upload an image there's the image and I can crop this now so that's great I can also zoom in to fill it continue and you're offered the option to add text to this I don't need to apply text we'll turn that off there we go so now I can hit save and I'll go back to the dashboard I hit the edit button and it says finish setting up your podcast so I'm going to hit continue and ready to distribute your podcast yes distribute my podcast if I go into settings and click on distribution this is the rss feed which every podcast has this is the precious link which tells the internet that this is your podcast series and at the moment it says available on listening platforms anchor and Spotify anchor will distribute it everywhere so apple podcast google podcast and all the other places where podcasts appear maybe I could cut to myself in the future to show that my podcast has been distributed automatically to everywhere did this help if you managed to get your podcast onto anchor like a beginner like me say hi in the comments below give me a thumbs up if you reach this point of the video and if you're feeling awesome the subscribe button would be much appreciated I'm going to be doing lots more of this so thanks for coming on my journey and here is what youtube thinks 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