Podcasting 101: The Best Hosts and Websites for Your Show

Yes, folks.

Welcome back, Boomer podcasters.

I almost said it.

I almost did it, folks.

I almost said five minutes of gray hair day.

The weird thing is I'm going to record five minutes with gray hair Dave.

After I record this one and before I added either one, I want you to know that the intro again, she was created by ElevenLabs IO, which is an AI voice creating system program.

However you want to talk about it or say what it is, that's what it is.

Okay, so here's what we're talking about today.

I want you to know we're going to talk about a couple of things today.

It was mainly going to be about podcast hosts.

And then secondly, I want to talk to you really quickly about a podcast website.

Okay?

Now the first thing I want to say is podcast hosts are normally a personal choice.

I have a quick story here.

When I first started five years ago, I started out with a company called Anchor, Anchor fm.

They were free and you had the opportunity to monetize.

Well, free isn't always what good enough for me.

Free isn't always what it's cracked up to be.

And we all know that.

We've been around a while.

We're Boomers, we're Gen Xers, we're Gen Wires, we're any age, but we're not completely stupid.

But that program, I did my first one on it and it was okay.

And that's where I got my bones in my sense, my bones on some editing because I would export it then to, and then go to audacity doc, audacity.org and I would edit it there and then put it back out there, send it back over to Anchor and they would distribute it.

And back then I was also making sure that I was distributing everything myself.

I made sure that Apple got it, Spotify got it, YouTube got it and well, not YouTube so much then, but now.

But you know, the Google Play back then, which is no longer available for podcast.

So I did about five or six, maybe seven or eight on that one.

And I stopped because I had a different idea that I wanted to go with and I did and I went with that with the Audacity, not Audacity.

I went with Anchor FM again and I wasn't happy with it.

You can only.

There's only so much you can do.

I was not, you know, you could put ads in and I liked that.

But I didn't like that.

It was again, I was still new at it.

But you know, we tried it and as soon as I stopped and I decided that I was going to go on to something different because I was told I couldn't go on with that podcast.

And I've talked about that before.

When my podcast and I separated was called Memories from the Mouth, I had to stop because of the company I worked for.

I went through the process and then they basically came back and said, stop or you're in trouble.

And they said it nicely.

Yeah.

Anyway, anyway, I then changed over from Anchor to Captivate fm.

I had been listening to podcasts on podcasting, and I found this guy named Mark Asquith from England, and they had a relatively new program called Captivate fm.

And I looked at it and I looked at the whole program and I said, you know what?

Let's.

Let's try this.

Let's go here instead.

Now, Anchor FM was eventually bought up by Spotify and is now called Podcasters or Spotify for Podcasters, or something to that effect.

It's free.

And I'm going to be honest with you folks.

I do not suggest that you go there, and there's a reason behind that.

You don't own anything there.

These other ones I'm going to tell you about today, and I'm going to listen in the PDF that you can find on the website.

You own your own material on Spotify.

For podcasters, I'm pretty sure you don't own your own material.

I found a way to get all of my memories from the mouse out because I had local recordings.

I then put those local recordings that I had into Captivate and I was much happier there.

So there.

I have gone through a few, but I also was with Libsyn for a little bit.

And if you listen to what's going on in the world today, Libsyn has lost a few big names in their company.

They've got a good product.

Don't get me.

I'm not.

I'm not disparaging them at all, but I.

I don't know that they have the energy that they had in the beginning.

Let's just go with that.

Okay, so we're a few minutes in here, so let's get started with this list.

Now, I have.

I put a few, but not all on the website, but let's talk about it quickly.

When you go to.

There's a podcast index.

It's called podcast index.org podcast index.org where you can get a list of all the apps that are out there.

If you're looking for a host, there's a few that I recommend.

One is Blueberry.

It's B L U B R R Y It is.

It's a hosting company and directory.

Something I want you to understand here, right at the very, very beginning too, is almost every one of these hosting companies will give you a website that goes along with your podcast and they're in control of it.

Just so you know.

I mean, it's basically just if you're at Captivate, it's Captivate fm backslash, five minutes of gray hairedave.

And I really can't add much to that.

I can go to it with PowerPoint and do things there, but if you're not big on how to work through PowerPoint, PowerPoint or WordPress is going to be difficult.

Just saying.

But they give you a basic website with all of your podcasts, you know, in order.

And you get to choose some things.

You get to choose the artwork, you get to choose the colors, you get to choose your podcast player that you want to use.

Hold, please.

Okay.

You get to choose the podcast player you use.

I always go with Captivates because I'm very happy with it.

Again, I am with Captivate fm.

So that's out there.

Blueberry.

Blueberry is.

Let's see here.

I'm going to pull these up at the same time we're doing this and give you pricing.

So Blueberries pricing plans, they start at $12 a month and you get approximately two and a half hours for that.

It also gives you standard, standard statistics.

And Blueberry is good.

And there's a guy out there who has a podcast about it.

I personally don't go with him.

That's just me.

Again, don't worry about it.

Another one is Sovereign Feeds.

Sovereign Feeds is more of a.

How do I put this?

It's a 2.0 exclusive site and I'm not going to go any further than that.

Pot Home.

Pot Home, I looked at that yesterday.

Looks pretty cool.

The pricing on it isn't terrible.

It's 15amonth.

You can start a free day, 30 day trial to see if you like it.

It's got all kinds of great things that you're going to find in most podcast hosting companies now.

They're almost all going to have some kind of AI generated transcripts, chapters, clips and more.

Some of them are going to have dynamic content that you can insert.

They're going to have automation.

They're going to be podcasting 2.0 compliant.

Podcasting 2.0 compliance is value for value.

Clips, chapters, transcripts, things such as that.

I looked at it yesterday, it's not a bad looking deal.

Let's see what's next on that list.

RSS Blue is a hosting company and their pricing isn't terrible, but I'm not wild about the the way it goes.

It's $1.50 an episode with a minimum monthly charge of $5.

I you look at this site, folks, and I'll be honest with you, I ain't thrilled.

It's good.

Don't get me wrong, I hear lots of people complying and complimenting them, but I just am not a fan.

Next is just RSS feed, so they're all in one.

Podcasting is about $12 a month, you know, 14, $15 a month if you're not buying it annually.

And they'll do audio to video convert conversions.

They'll give you a website for your show.

They'll automatically distribute distribute for you.

I don't see anything about about AI features for your transcriptions yet, but that doesn't mean they're not there or not coming.

Now here's my favorite Captivate fm.

Captivate is a great, great don't get me wrong, the one thing I like about Captivate is you can have more than one podcast under the same name and it's right now I've got four on five on there and they keep increasing the amount of bandwidth you get to have.

So for $17 a month on the monthly charge, I'm sorry, it's $19 a month on a monthly chart.

You get up to 30,000 downloads, unlimited podcasts, unlimited updates and storage, and extensive distribution.

They also have AI, dynamic AI for transcripts for chapter, all this kind of fun.

They also do dynamic insertion for ads and I find it to have this has helped me get rid of a couple of programs that I was using.

That's costing me.

That was costing me more than Captivate.

One was Swell AI.

Swell AI.

I used to take all my podcasts, I'd pop them in there to Swell AI and they did a great job at doing transcripts at show names, timestamps, everything.

They'd even write me a blog post if I wanted it.

But this will do the same thing and it's got everything else that I'm doing in here, so I can't say enough about that.

Also, folks, I have to tell you, I am an affiliate with Captivate, so if you sign up with them, I'm going to get a little bit of a bump from that.

A little bit.

A little bit of money.

Okay, just Cast is another one and I'm only going to hit some of the ones that I've looked into and they're okay.

I got the link to this podcast site that I'm on called Podcast Index and go there and look at them all and investigate them yourself.

Don't wait on me.

So which one is this?

We're looking at just cast.

So for $19 a month, which is a professional one, or even if you go to the $9 a month one, you get two podcasts, unlimited episodes.

You get 200 minutes of transcripts, AI content, which is great.

Automatic video to audio conversion, which if you're doing a video podcast as well as an audio podcast that's allowing you to grab.

Just grab the audio out of it without having to go through a bunch of hassle.

I personally do that myself.

I don't have to worry about that.

They've got listener management, one click, listener access.

They got episode scheduling.

They've got a lot of great things for that money.

Okay, next on the list that I want you to look at is Buzzsprout.

Buzzsprout's been around a while.

Have great things that I've heard about them.

Their pricing isn't ridiculous unless you.

Unless you're going to put out a lot of hours.

So if.

Let's just say you were going to put out $6 or six hours a month, you know, and that you think about it, that's not a lot.

If you're doing one a week and it ends up being 45 minutes to an hour, it can happen.

Or you go an hour and a half, one day and you want to leave it.

But it's not a bad price.

Lots of people, they've got.

They've got good pricing.

They can.

They will help you with ads if you want to run ads.

They also have, you know, advanced statistics.

It's a really.

A lot of people who are very important in podcasting have big names like Sam Sethi and guys like that.

They will use Buzzsprout.

Okay, now let's go on to.

Here's one I wanted to talk about.

And this is Vodeo.

Vodio is a podcast player and hosting, but it's from out of the country, so none of this is in English, so you can read it.

If you're in another country, look into this.

But I just want you to know if you're out there and you don't live in the US there's options for you.

There really are.

There's a lot of options out there for you.

Let's see.

Prodigy or Prodigy.

I'm sorry, I think they.

Cool.

That's a cool name.

Prodigy.

Yeah.

You're going to have to accept their cookies or don't accept their cookies.

They're going to allow you to try it for free for a month or I think maybe a month, maybe it's 14 days for them.

On your, your pricing, it's going to be about 12 bucks.

And it looks like they've got it in German too, which is cool.

So if you're from Germany, and I think there is somebody, one or two people from Germany who are listening, look into that one.

It's called Prodigy.

P O D I G E E Again, it'll be in the website and it'll be on this.

Here's one.

Red circle.

Red circle has been around for quite a while.

Okay.

I don't know why I keep saying okay.

But they've got, they've got some cool things and they've got hosting, of course, they distribute.

You know, they've got analytics, cross promotion, dynamic insertion, which almost everybody has.

They've got subscriptions and donations already set up and they say they have quick support.

Okay.

So it's, it's something to look at price wise.

Price wise, it's not bad.

So if you're looking at monthly, it's about 20 bucks.

It gives you all that.

It'll generate videos for your episode if you're, you know, recording it through with, with them.

So look into that and, and now.

And all these things, I'm telling you folks, they really are, they're, they're important.

But you've got to do your own research on podcasting, right?

You're going to talk about something that you are an expert at.

Then you may not need to do any research, but it doesn't hurt to write it down so that you've got a plan.

There's books out there on, on Amazon that you can get for podcast planning.

I don't have one right now.

I was going to build one.

You can get one for seven bucks.

I'm going to tell you the steps and show you the steps in the videos.

But it's piece of paper.

I want to talk about this on this show.

Boom.

I do suggest you keep track of what you're doing and the, the subjects and the main topping or talking points.

Talking points, Yeah.

I can talk today.

Okay, so those are some of them.

Okay.

There's a lot of them in here.

Again, remember I said libsum.

That's spelled L, I, B, S, Y, N.

I don't.

I am.

I am.

They've lost a lot of key people, folks.

They really have.

Now you get quite a bit of bandwidth.

But they're really.

I don't believe I could be wrong.

I just don't believe they're keeping up yet.

I mean, they're as fast as some of these others.

Or they've got dynamic podcast ads.

Yeah, all the other ones do.

They've got easy to publish.

All the other ones do audio and video support.

So the one advantage they have is they do video.

I mean, they will help you get your video posted.

So will everybody else.

Captivate FM has a sign or a little.

You can put it in your.

Your video into.

Put there and they send it over to YouTube for you.

So they've all got them.

Okay?

They've all got them.

And it's.

It's good.

They.

They're all doing a fine job.

There's.

If they weren't doing a fine job, folks, they wouldn't be around now if you're.

You're talking now.

I mean, I can keep going on and on and on and on, but I don't want to on that.

We're going to change subjects.

Okay, you need to go through this.

And there's another one called.

Just called Podcast apps dot com.

Let me pull it up.

Yeah.

It takes you right back to podcast index players.

Excuse the Peter.

Podcast players.

If you have an iPhone, it's automatically there.

It's got.

You're on itunes.

It's not itunes, it's Apple.

Podcasts used to be called itunes.

It is now called podcast.

All right, it's there.

It's native.

That means it's built into the pro or the phone.

When you get it, you just go in and pick the ones you want to use.

And I have used that for years.

I am now a big fan of Fountain as a podcast player because it allows you to send boosts, or if somebody you like is giving you value and you'd like to send them something of value back, it gives you that opportunity.

They now that is all part of podcasting 2.0, and that's called boosting or boosting grams.

Now boosting a lot of time now is done with Bitcoin.

There are still programs out there.

I have one.

I'm on five minutes of Gray Hair Dave.

It's called Buy me a cup of coffee, which means you can go there and just, you know, it's like PayPal or Patreon, which most of us have heard of.

There's a couple other ones out there.

I'll find them and list them next week.

But, you know, it's an opportunity that if you're getting value out of this because all these podcasts are free.

99% are free, some are not, some are paid and some are private.

That's okay.

Everybody has that right.

So one thing to remember is that you get to choose what you do.

But listening wise, the two that are out there that are really, really good if you want to get away from Apple podcasts and if you're on an Android, Google, their Google podcast player doesn't work anymore.

They've shut that down.

So you can go to Fountain, you can go to another one called Podcast Guru.

It gets you all the same things and it's good on an Android or an Apple.

True Fans.

True Fans is Android, Fediverse, Linux, iOS, Mac, Windows, all of them.

True Fans is by a guy named Sam Seth.

I think it's Sam Sethi who owns True Fans, I don't remember.

Anyway, anyway, they do a great job over there.

It's.

It's an app.

You put it on your phone, off you go.

Or you put it on your podcast player, you put it on your iPad, your.

Whatever you're using.

Okay, wanted to get into that.

Just there's all kinds of.

And podcast index.

Lists.

Lists.

Lists, yeah.

Okay, lists.

Most of them.

Most of these players don't cost you a penny to download or anything.

They're making their money off the advertising.

Okay.

I am not a affiliate of any podcast player at this point.

I may be soon.

So the next thing we're going to change subjects again.

The next thing I want to talk about is a website.

99% of all these podcast players, including Spotify, will give you a basic website again.

You get to choose some of the design, you get to choose the colors, you get to choose your artwork, you get to choose your podcast player.

Some may give you the opportunity to add pages, some may not.

I have used two different kinds of podcast website companies to take care of this for me so that I don't have to deal with it.

I am not great at building websites on WordPress.

I realized that when I was building Gray Hair Productions.

If you look at it, it's not fun.

I gotta up my game, which means I have to hire somebody else to do it.

That's why we do these things.

But so let's start out with the first one that I have, the first one that I used, the first one I used was Podcast Page IO.

And what they do, and I still use that on Poetry of Christian Faith, is they take your RSS feed from your podcast and they draw it in and that's how they start.

They will build the website for you and it takes a minute or so.

You can go in and you can do some customization.

You don't have to be a website expert at all.

You can add pages if you want.

Like if you want photos, if you want videos, you can add those.

It's pricing wise.

It's very, very reasonable.

It's.

I believe I am paying.

Yeah, I'm paying about $12 a month and that's not bad for a website.

It gives you one website.

It gives you all.

It gives you some cool things.

If you already have your domain name, they can be your domain name.

It doesn't have to be podcasting page or podcast page.

It can be boomer podcasters like mine because I own it also.

They also do the hosting.

They also give you custom pages and a blog.

The cool thing.

And a lot of.

And both of the companies I'm going to tell you about do this.

You can get voicemail messages.

So they'll put a little microphone wherever you want it in your page on all your pages.

Person clicks on that and they can leave you a voicemail.

All they have to do is give you their email address.

Right?

It is.

It's nice.

Now, did I stay with them for this next one?

No, the next two I have are not with podcast page IO, they're with pod page.

Pop page is.

Was closer to what I was looking for.

Pot page.

Nope.

That ain't.

Let me go over here and go to pod page.com.

that's what it's called.

Pod page.com, folks.

Now I have the basic one which gives you unlimited traffic.

If you have your own domain name, you can bring it.

It's podcast Focus design episodes magically appear Mobile optimized.

It's search engine optimized.

You can.

And I.

I pay for it yearly.

So it comes down to about $19 a month.

But I paid for the whole year because I like what it does.

It's going to give you a blog if you want it.

It's going to give you episode videos if you want them.

You can add transcripts.

You can in episode quick links, pretty links.

You can have categories and YouTube video matching.

Okay.

I also use it to add.

You can add pages too.

So I've got, you know, picture photo page and I've got that new page.

What would I buy?

Those kinds of things.

It's there and they've.

Of course they've all.

You can try it for free.

So what does it hurt?

Try it for free.

And I think it's for 14 days.

Even if it's seven days, look at it, See if it's something you might like.

They do.

They have marketing automation.

They do.

And if you want to, they do Apple banners, they do podcast player links.

They have the Follow page.

One of the things they do is they will help you with your posts.

Going over to Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn.

It'll help you generate revenue with affiliate programs, promotional memberships, episode donate page.

They'll give you a storefront, which I'm going to use display ads and give you.

There's so many things that they will.

They want to help you.

So I suggest them.

Am I affiliate of them?

I am an affiliate of podpage.com now.

You can go with either one.

Those are the two I know about.

If there's more out there, great.

Look them up.

Do your own research.

Right.

So what did we talk about today?

We talked about podcasting hosts.

A podcasting host is where you upload your art.

Your edited podcast host is where you upload your edited audio and or video.

And then they will distribute it for you and they will keep it for you on their servers and they will take care of all these things.

Distribution.

You've got to look at them to see all the things that they do.

Before you say, well, that's.

I can't do that.

If you can't do that, it's hard to have a podcast without a host.

Can it be done?

It can.

I don't know if I'd want to do it because it's.

It's difficult now.

Could you just say, well, I'll do then, you know, Dave, I'll just send everything over to YouTube.

Great.

How are you going to get it there?

If you're a podcaster and you're going to YouTube with just your podcast, not the video, but just the audio, they pull it in through RSS feeds.

If you don't have one, how do you bring it in?

You can't.

If you're just going to do video podcasting and yeah, you don't need one, but why wouldn't you have audio there too?

To help you out?

If you're trying to promote yourself or sell something or promote your business, you're going to want to do video.

Heck, yeah.

We're going to talk about video next week.

Oh, by the way, videos next week.

But why not?

You've got to have this.

It's not that expensive.

Do you have to pay by the year for Pod Page?

No, but I've got two podcasts on there.

It allows more than one so I'm just saying, why not?

It's a thought.

So we talked about hosts, we talked about websites, we talked a little bit about podcast players for your devices.

My suggestion, as always, is do a little research on your own.

Find out what you think is going to be best for you.

Try them out, download them on your phone or on your iPad.

Try them.

If you don't like them, delete them.

Doesn't have to be a permanent thing, right?

So that's what we talked about today, right?

That's in a.

That is, in a nutshell, what we did.

Now, here's what we always say at the end.

The reason I try and do this every single time, folks, it's.

It's twofold.

One, to let you know that this is where the end is.

Two, I want you to think about it.

So if you know somebody who doesn't know what a podcast is, doesn't know where to find one, how to.

How to choose a genre, how to play it, follow it, subscribe to it, please show them.

Part of the reasoning for that, folks, telling you all this every time is consistency.

I'm going to say it at the end of every show.

Also, folks, don't forget to smile at somebody.

You're going to make their day.

Okay?

It will make your day, too.

So you all have a wonderful day, have a great weekend, and I will talk to you next week.

And that's all about video.

Bye.