I love blogging. I have been on joeuser.com for many years now (kinda wonder why I am not on the list of leading bloggers). I have been testing other blogs such as WordPress, Blogger and LiveJournal looking to expand my reach although so far none have the features I love most about joeuser.com.

Looking to make my blog more interesting, I decided to try podcasting. I figured since I like to talk a lot and I feel some articles just don’t express how you feel about a certain topic when writing it, a podcast may be the way to go. But how to get the podcast to the masses? How to use the current blogs I have to share my podcast as well. In doing some research I came across www.podbean.com, a great website for hosting your own podcast. Podbean is basically a blog that allows you to upload mp3’s of podcast you created to post and share with others. Now, I never actually intended to use podbean.com as my new blogsite but this is why podbean was exactly what I was looking for. You see, podbean has this feature that, once you publish the mp3 you uploaded to your account, the post provides an embeddable code that can be posted to a blog as seen on the image below.

So what does the code do? Something pretty cool actually. The embeddable code creates a mini player linked to the podcast you published and embeds it into the site giving people the ability to listen to your podcast right from the website or blog post. See below for a sample:

Forgive my lousy talking. For a guy who talks a lot I sure screwed up this small podcast. It was fun to do though; with some practice I should be able to sound like any other podcaster out there. As the short podcast explains, with some simple tools like Audacity for recording and editing (remember to also have the lame DLL file to save the recording as an mp3 with Audacity), a decent microphone (I use a headphone with built in mic for the moment) and some topics and ideas written down to help get the podcast going, in no time you can start off in the wonderful world of podcasting. With a little research you can find royalty free theme music you can add to you podcast as an intro and exit so as to give it a more professional touch.

Podbean.com has different account options you can find here. I chose the free account for now which offers just enough features for a first timer; 100 MB of space, 5 GB bandwith, the embeddable player and more. If the podcast happens to take off and I need to expand I can always pick a paid for package with more storage and more bandwith. Podbean has many other features but since I am only starting to use the site I can’t really give much details as I have not tried them all yet. As I do, I look forward to making podcast at least once a week to post here on joeuser.com to see how it goes. I hope you all listen up and share with others.

If you’re interested in making your own podcast, give podbean.com a try. You just might like it.