My Top 5 Free Tools For PodCasting in 2019

My selection of free tools I use for the making, automation and marketing of podcasts

#1 Audacity – Free, open source, cross-platform audio software
Audacity is an easy-to-use, multi-track audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems.
Developed by a group of volunteers as open source

#2 Levelator – Free software that will level your sound for when you have more than one speaker and they have sound levers higher or lower. So what is The Levelator®?
It’s not a compressor, normalizer or limiter although it contains all three. It’s much more than those tools, and it’s much simpler to use. The UI is dirt-simple: Drag-and-drop any WAV or AIFF file onto The Leveler’s application window, and a few moments later you’ll find a new version which just sounds better.
Have you ever recorded an interview in which you and your guest ended up at different volumes? How about a panel discussion where some people were close to microphones and others were not?

#3 Zoom – Here you can record the video and sound if you are interviewing someone remotely. Because why wouldn’t you want to have extra content to make a video. This is also a free tool

#4 WordPress – Yes you can get a WordPress blog to post your show notes that will generate SEO and Google ranking, so eventually you start getting visitors to your site that you can capture emails, or even monetize with ads.

#5 Zappier – Zapier is an American for-profit corporation and a web-based service that allows end users to integrate the web applications they use.
Connect the apps you use everyday to automate your work and be more productive. 1000+ apps and easy integrations

Today, as you read on the title I’m gonna give you the top 5 free tools for podcasters.

So if you are a podcaster or if you are planning on starting a podcast or even if you’re none of those, but you are just somebody that is curious about podcasting and you want to know how podcasting is done, you’re gonna hear the 5 top free tools that you can use while podcasting.

So starting by number one is going to be Audacity. Audacity. Like, how do you have the audacity not to use Audacity? This is a 100% tool in case you wanted to know, I am using it right now to record this. So if you are listening to me, this is being recorded with Audacity.

Audacity, like I said is free and you can use it to record. So you’re gonna download it. It’s going to be installed in your computer. And now you’re gonna select your microphone in here. Of course, you can use the built-in microphone if you have in your computer.

That’s not going to give you the top quality but you can use anything you have at your disposition right now. All right. And you play around with it even if you don’t have a podcast and you plan on starting one.

You can allow you can download this right now and do tests with your built-in microphone. And test it and just see what is up with Audacity.

With Audacity, not only you can record but you can edit your sound. So if you have a bunch of uhm, ahs, ooh, that kind of sounds, you can go back, select these sounds, delete them and make you sound a lot smarter than in reality you are.

You can put effects in there, you can increase the volume, decrease the volume just to make sure that people are going to hear you. And there’s a lot you can do. So check out Audacity.

Of course there is no affiliate links for this because it is 100% free. Everything in there is free. There is no upgrades or nothing that you need to do.

Okay, let’s jump over to tool number two. Tool number two is somewhat of an unknown tool for, I don’t know what reason, but even me, I only found out about this probably a month ago.

Now this tool is something that is very needed and appreciated and again 100% free. They have the option that you can buy them a coffee if you want. If you use the tool and you really love it, you can buy them coffee, send them a couple of bucks or not. But like I said, this is a free software that will level your sound. So your sound can always be leveled in case you have guests.

I heard a lot of podcasts and I heard a lot of people podcasting that do not level their sound.

So when they have a guest on their show and let’s say the host asks a question, their volume, because they have a special mic or maybe the person being interviewed has a better mic or louder mic, the volume of one is a lot higher than the other one. So you can hear the question and you don’t hear the answer.
And you’ve got to keep cranking up the volume and decreasing the volume. That means that that podcaster did not level their sound.

Now there are a lot of paid tools to do this. There’s a lot of people that pay VAs, virtual assistants, virtual admins to do this editing for them when in reality, you can select tool number two that is Levelator.
Levelator, what else would it be called, right?

Levelator, just like it sounds again is a tool that can do this for you. All you have to do is have your sound on WAV format. So if you have Audacity example and you’re recording, at the end you can export this file and turn it into a WAV file.
I call it a WAV file, W-A-V file. And I call it the WAV file. Then you can upload it to Levelator and nothing else needs to be done.
You just upload it. As soon as it’s uploaded, Levelator is going to level it and export it back to your computer without you needing to click anything else.

That is it. And now everybody in that conversation will have the same volume.
Because sometimes you know when somebody’s talking to the microphone and that’s what you’re supposed to do, let’s say when you see a live event or a sports host they have to speak directly into the microphone at all times.
Because the sound is live and it is not gonna be edited, so they have to be facing the microphone.
Because if you face away from the microphone, the sound that the microphone is going to capture now is the ricochet of your sound.
It’s not the direct sound. And of course, it is not going to be as high as volume.
So same as if you’re interviewing somebody and they bend over to tie their shoe while they’re talking to you, their sound is going to go a lot down.

Levelator is going to take care of that for you for free. So check them out.

And in case you don’t know where to find them because they do not own the site Levelator.com, do not go to Levelator.com. I will put it on the show notes for you to click and for it to be easy for you to access this tool.
Of course there is no affiliate links to any free tools. I’ll just make sure to repeat that.
Now about my show notes. I’m gonna put this on the show notes and often, if you are a listener of the show you probably think, “He keeps mentioning the show notes and I have never visited his site.” QASellingOnline.com.

Now, today you may be a different mood and you may think, “Well let’s go check his site. Let’s go check QASellingOnline.com and see what all the fuss is about.” And just so you go there so you can say bad things about it.
Have a look and say, “Wow this site sucks. I thought it was gonna be better” or “this is actually better than I expected.” Just go there and have a look. Check out the show notes for this episode and check out the link to Levelator.
We’re going to jump over to tool number three. Again, tool number three is absolutely free.

This one it is free but it has an option to upgrade. To be completely honest, I only need the free tool and I have two podcasts. I have one which consists of lots and lots of interviews. Every single one is an interview and I have this tool that is called Zoom.
Zoom can be found at zoom.us.

And Zoom is absolutely free. It is a video recording software. So it’s going to record, it is like a web conference software but it’s free.

It’s amazing and it does something super cool. When you’re interviewing somebody, if you have not used Zoom yet, what it does is it’s going to capture to see who is speaking at that moment and the camera is going to focus on that person’s face.
So when one speaks, the other person, of course, shuts up, right?
That’s the way I was trained when actually back in Portugal my parents used to say when one donkey speaks, the other one lowers its ears or bends its ears. I don’t know. Something like that.
Anyway, as a host, if you ask a question it’s going to focus on your face.

Then when the person that you are interviewing starts answering, it’s going to focus on their face.
And of course, you may be thinking, “But I’m just a podcaster, I don’t do video.” Well, it’s free content.
You’re doing a podcast because you want exposure and you want to be heard.
You have a message to be heard or the person that you are interviewing has a message to be heard.

Now, what better way than to get a free platform out there where you can get video and post this video now on LinkedIn, post this video on YouTube, post it on Facebook.

And if you get 1 or 2 or 3 extra people to watch this video, your 3 extra listens that you didn’t have before when you’re starting out.
Let me tell you, 3 extra listens, that could turn into 3,000 or 30,000, right? You never know with Facebook and YouTube. You can get 30, 40, 50 thousand views to a video if it is worth it.
So that is again Zoom.
A lot of people may say, “Well I have a better software than that,” well your software may be better than that because I’m not saying Zoom is the best. It is super cool.

It is very good and is super free. So that is what I’m bringing up on today’s episode. This is not the top 5 tools in the world for podcasting; these are my top 5 free tools.

Okay now that brings me to number four. Number four is WordPress. Now I told this to one person once and they say, “Well, WordPress is not a tool.” What is it then?
If it’s not a tool, what is it? “It’s a blog.” Well, that is kinda right but kind of incorrect.
A blog itself is a tool. It’s a tool for you to create exposure and to show the world your message. Because if you own a blog, I can guarantee that you are blogging for somebody to read. Or you have a picture blog and you want people to see those pictures or else you wouldn’t be online. So it is a tool that’s going to display your message or display your pictures, display your products for sale because WordPress could be used for anything. And it’s not the only good tool it is /an amazing tool because 51% of the whole internet is made from WordPress. 51% of the internet.

Let me give you a couple of free tools within WordPress because there’s also something you have to look into and have in consideration that WordPress, you’re gonna get it at wordpress.org.

I recommended this to a partner of mine once and by the time he was done he said, “Well I got WordPress like you said but it wasn’t actually free. I’m paying 20 bucks a month.” What he did was he went to wordpress.com. In wordpress.com you’re gonna get the free software which is what we’re talking about, the WordPress software, the script. But at wordpress.com, you get hosting services. And he got a $20 hosting service so he could host is WordPress blog.
Now you can go to wordpress.org, download it 100% for free, the exact same thing that you’re gonna get a wordpress.com.
Now, you are going to need of course a host to have this online.
And when you’re starting out, you don’t have a big audience.

You don’t have thousands and thousands of people that are flocking to your blog to read it, so you’re gonna start with a normal server this going to cost you 4-5 bucks per month.
Now we’re looking at if you pay for a full year up front, it may cost you 50 bucks to have a blog up in the air live. Now it’s up to you to pick what kind of host you want. Because I have my own server, I can put unlimited blogs up in my server and it’s not gonna cost me any extra.
I got to pay the exact same $800 a year for my server and it doesn’t cost anything more to upload an unlimited amount of blogs.
The free extra tools I want to give you besides the five I’m going to mention here is within WordPress, you can download apps that are going to do different things.
You can get SEO apps that are going to help you rank better in Google by making sure that you are doing what you need to do to be relevant to Google’s crawlers.
The top one is going to be Yoast SEO which is also free. And if you do search for WordPress SEO, Yoast is the first one that shows up.
And by being the first one that shows up it tells me that they actually know how to do SEO because they’re the first one shows up. So that’s proof right there.

The proof is in the pudding.

Several other apps that you can use inside of WordPress, one is Blubrry Power Press.
It’s called Power Press and it’s made by Blubrry, one of the top 3 biggest podcast hosts in the world. This is again for free.
If you’re gonna be hosting your sound, your media files, the MP3 like this that you’re listening to right now with the MP3 file that is download into my own server, so I have an unlimited… it’s not really unlimited but I have a huge amount of space in Terabytes that I can use to put all the sound in there.

I have over 300 episodes, plus the hour-long interviews that I have for my other podcast are in there.
If you have a smaller host of course you can do, I don’t know, 40-50 gigs or whatever into that. Or you can get a paid Libsyn or Power Press hosting.

But we’re not going to mention those today because those are paid tools, so they’re not relevant to hear about that. The app that you can put in your WordPress, the PowerPress one is absolutely free. And that’s going to help you do SEO for your podcast, which is a little bit different than Google SEO.

Let’s jump over to tool number five. And my free tool number five is called Zapier. What is Zapier?

Zapier is an automation tool that’s going to automatically share the podcast in social media for you. So it doesn’t only just do that. In case you don’t know Zapier, it can do basic tasks automatically. You set up what you want to do, let’s say you post something on Twitter and you want to automatically post what you posted on Twitter, on let’s say LinkedIn, it can do that for you.

You want for example, if somebody tweets the hashtag podcast, you want to be able to save those tweets into an excel spreadsheet.
Or for example, if you have a calendar link you want that every time somebody books a, let’s say a meeting with you, you have those 15-minute meetings or something, you want it to send you a text message so it will text you. And then you can write the text that you are going to receive.

In my case, for example, is, “Yay, you got a new lead!” Or if somebody fills one of my Google docs, I get one that says, “You received another Google form filled.” That kind of stuff. It does a ton of things.
I can share for example when I post a video on YouTube, it will share on… or the other way around, when I post… that’s what it is, when a podcast comes out on Spotify, it will share on YouTube.
It will make its own video which is just a sound video, of course, there’s no real image. It’s just a static image but it will upload it to YouTube automatically.
So that kind of stuff. That’s what Zapier does. You can check out Zapier for free as well. You have a limited amount, I believe you can do up to 10 different zaps for free.
Not sure now if it’s 5 or 10 but either way, you can play around with it and test things. And it is pretty, pretty cool. Now I got down to the top 5 free tools for podcasting.
In my case, I use these all the time.

Something I wanna touch on before I go is when I was talking about WordPress, I mentioned apps and of course, they are apps but inside WordPress, they are called plug-ins. So if you want to add the plugins that I mentioned, you can go to WordPress, click on the plugins, add new and of course, you’re going to find the ones that I mentioned which is the Yoast SEO, the Power Press. And I wanna throw something else in there which is the PixelYourSite. When you get that app… here I go again with apps again, that plugin.
When you get the plugin called PixelYourSite, you can throw your Facebook pixel in there or your Google pixel in there and now you can read target people that are visiting your podcast if you want to. If you don’t want to you still got that pixel in there that is learning more and more about your audience. And that’s it for today.

Thank you very much for listening. Remember, start grateful, stay positive and always profit.