A lot of podcasters are obsessed with stats, including my self. Just knowing you have listeners is a fulfilling experience that one never gets ove, that is for the first 6 months. I launched a network of shows at Qetuo.me and wanted to know how well my first shows where doing.

Over time, as I have done before, I’ll stop looking at those stats, knowing that people are listening to what I have to say or do.
It isnt that bad to take a peek once an a blue moon to see if there was one show that people listened to more than another, or to see something is wrong with a feed or something you did or didnt do in your show or blog.

In the old days we used to have a plugin track the stats, but over time the developer stopped updating it.
Some would use Feedburner, but to tell you the truth, it never tracked the downloads in a correct way.
Now a days we have reliable services that offer great cloud stats software, so you can track your shows and listeners.

Podtrac – Podtrac is one that I’m just getting into, so I cant say much as of yet, but looking it over the stats, aha well they are just plain jane. If your looking for something like this Podtrac is for you. I also didnt like the submitting proses they wanted a lot of info, just for stats.
Blubrry and TechPodcasts (Only for Technology Podcasters) – I have to say Raw Voice the parent company that owns both sites are the best when it comes to stats. They offer a out of this world free service allows you to view what device, program, country, etc for each podcast. and the $5 premium stats are even better.
libsyn – For now libsyn is third in stats reason being is you have to sign up for there hosting plans in order to take advantage of there stats. but if it was just stats it would be second over blubrry.

[Image Credit kevinzhengli From flicker]

There are many ways you can record your podcast. You can podcast from a car, train, semi, closet, a bar, or even walking in your neighborhood, or even a beach.
When you are doing a podcast you do want a quiet room but there are some situations that you may want an ambient noise, noise can be great in the background, but can also can be a distraction, that is if it’s the wrong type of noise, the wrong type of noise can be a hiss,buzz, or popping coming from your microphone. If you’re in your studio, you don’t want to have a lot of noise and most podcasters want it to be really quiet, but if you have any handheld microphone like a Edirol R-09HR High-Resolution WAVE/MP3 Recorder that can pick up great ambient noises for your podcast, which your audience may enjoy.

To start you off I’ll first start talking about recording in a car.
Some podcasters record in their car and due to time constraints they podcast while on your way to work, some even record while they carpool, like Robert Llewellyn’s CarPool Podcasts. I’ve even hear podcasters podcast on there way home from work, or even on your way to the grocery store, the possibility’s are endless.
One thing that you will undoubtedly find out when you’re recording in your car is the ambient noise is not really good, and can turn your listeners off. Try it out and see what your listeners say.
You can’t also podcast from your car and not go anywhere just think about it what are you surrounded by? You’re surrounded by pretty much carpet and upholstery, which cuts your noise of your podcast down alot, if you have kids, dog, thin walls, or a bitchy wife this is great place to podcast from, very low noise and absorbent materials why not?

Next up is semi-truck; another great way to record a podcast, just think of it as a car… although if you’re driving down the road you may not what to podcast because it is of course really noisy, but if you have some downtime, your truck can be a great place to podcast, the only problem is a lot of trucks have plastic in them, and sound can bounce off the walls. To fix this problem you can easily pull the curtain across the cab and speak into the microphone while facing the curtain. What this does is the curtain absorbs the sound waves made by your voice thereby canceling out and won’t reflect back the other walls and back into the microphone.
What you can also do is get your self a dynamic microphone that will cancel out any ambient noise within your podcast.

Who’s in the closet? When you’re looking at a car it’s about the same if you have a walk-in closet you have clothing on the right and left and possibly in front of you, now if you sit in the middle of your closet the voice vibrations that is coming out of your mouth will hit the clothing and will be absorbed and not reflect back.
To hinder back to when I talked about the car, sound is being absorbed by almost everything the only problem is the ceiling most ceilings are drywall and bounce sound waves, but it shouldn’t be that bad because once the waves bounces off the ceiling the clothing should cancel any sound waves.

Bars, Pubs, and Restaurants . These public/Privet places are a great place for ambient noise so why not podcast from them? although it can be a little bit noisy at times, but if you record during the day between five and seven were pretty quiet and you have a lot of elderly and people getting off from work the best is to have a crowd around 8-10 most places close at around between 10pm to 12am maybe even later. I used to work at a bar and a restaurant that closed around 1 AM. The best time to record in these places are between opening and just before closing those of the great times have podcast because the noise isn’t that high although you might have music in the background and might not be a good thing because of copyright for the music. but hey you can always say you where drunk when you where recording

Neighborhood walking is a great place to podcast if you have a portable recorder walking in your neighborhood can be an enjoyment in itself if you’re walking to get fit why not walk in podcast to any great ambient noises coming from the birds, crickets, field mice, or raccoons in the background, are all great ambient noises your listens may enjoy, the same thing goes for beaches just think of it a stream flowing down some rocks, water rushing to the shoreline! aha sound like I need a vacation… Although podcasting from the beach or somwhere there is dirt can probably causing problems with your sound equipment and may not be a good idea but that is way man invented ziplock bags to put your recorder in

If you enjoyed this blog post, Please leave a comment below or tell your fellow podcasters about it.

Battling noises might just be the hardest thing a podcaster deals with, I my self live about a mile from a private Airport and am inline with the planes that love to play touch and go (A fake landing).
Among the noise coming from TV’s, fans and surprise guests, they like to play a key roll in my podcasts, in this blog post I will tell you how to lower/eliminate noise that is being picked up in your recordings.

1 The first line off defense is your microphone, their are 3 types of microphones out there that we need to cover, Condenser, Dynamic, and Ribbon microphones.
Most podcasters cant afford ribbon mics due to the fact that the price tag ranges around $900+, so I’m only going to use the other two (Condenser and Dynamic).

Condenser Microphones
Condenser Microphones are almost as common as the cold, and when it comes to picking up noise Condenser microphones are the worst. Condenser microphones are used in a lot of consumer products, from a cellphones, Webcam Microphones, and the cheap $10 headset/microphone combos. Condenser’s love to pick up everything, Why?

Condenser microphones capture sound using a conductive diaphragm with a capacitance charged plate behind it. The charge is supplied by a DC voltage source from a battery or from the 48 volt ‘phantom power’ supply present in most mixers and mic preamps. Air pressure changes meeting the conductive diaphragm cause it to move, which causes an analogous AC voltage to be formed in the charged plate. These tiny AC voltages are sent to a tiny preamp built into the microphone, which brings the signal level up to where it can drive a typical microphone preamp. This is why a Condenser microphone picks up ALOT of noise.
So the trick with this type of microphone is to turn the volume down, buy a pop filter, and talk closer into the mic.
This will eliminate about 75% of all noise.
I have a friend that owns a CAD GTX2200 Condenser Microphone, Not a bad mic, he sounds great on it, but the problem is not the mic, it is the phone and bird about 20 feet away. By doing this it eliminated the phone and took the volume of the bird so low, we where able to record a distant podcast with out the recording being pegged when the bird talks.

Dynamic Microphones
Thank you god! Dynamic microphones do not have problems like condensers. Why? well Dynamic mics use a ‘moving coil’ to sense the changes in air pressure that makes sound waves. The wire coil is connected to a thin diaphragm, and the whole assembly is suspended over a permanent magnet. When moving air hits the diaphragm it causes the coil to move over the magnet, which causes a process called electromagnetic induction to take place. This causes an AC voltage to be formed that is an electrical ‘analogy’ of the original sound and lowering the noise being sent. This is why you have to what we call eat the microphone for your self to be heard.
although a fan or a loud noise can be picked up from this type for microphone its a lot less then Condensers

2 The second line of defense is a mixer. A normal mixer Has a Gain, High, Mid, Low and Vol nobs or sliders.
the first is gain when dealing with noise you will be dealing with this and the vol. you want to dial this in to where you dont hear any noise, but sill can record at a decent volume.
High, Mid, and Low are freq for your voice Highs tend to bring in some noise and give your voice some warmth, Mids tend to just stick around, unless you have a bass voice. And then you have Low… Low is what you would expect from the word, the low end of your voice, If you want a bassy voice but you sound like a chipmunk, the low nob should help you out.

3 Among all the great hardware that helps someone to eliminate noise is is the third line of defense a Gate/Limiter/Compressor. What the gate does is keeps the microphone off until it hears a signal at the level you have set, Limiters do as what the name describes Limits the ammout of audio, and Compressors keeps the volume at a consent level as to not clip or peek the recording/performance. The Cheaper ones you can buy only come with Compressor/Limiter and or a Gate, but you can be purchased with all three.

4 The forth line of defense is you, Take the time and close the windows, turn off the fans, give the kids $10 for the Ice Cream Man/Lady, lock the dog up, memorize the train schedule, etc. Things are going to happen, and that is why God made a pause button.

As a word of advice the closer the better, is to reduce background noise .

Have something to add?, Please leave a comment below.

When it comes to media hosting it all depends on your needs, Some podcasters host their media on web hosting servers to cut the cost to a minimum, others use free hosting, and then you have the people who have money to pay for hosting.
The average podcast brings in between 300-500 downloads per episode the first year. At around 36MB for an hour show, a bandwidth bill could add up to be huge.

Adam Carolla, earlier this year (2009) launched a podcast that brought in over 1 million downloads the first week, making it the number the number one iTunes podcast in the US and Canada. But had racked up a bandwidth bill so high he was forced to start advertising to pay for the bandwidth bills.
Now I’m not saying your going to be the next Adam Carolla, but you just might some day.
When looking for hosting you want to compare and ask. Alot of people have gotten ripped from hosting company’s that clam they have the best hosting and then fall off the face of the earth a week later, leaving the publisher scrambling to find a new host.
The list below are media hosting company’s that have been in the podcast space for some time and has been proven to provide support for new media. I also exclude providers that don’t offer a monthly upload limit and make you delete your old shows after you hit your storage limit, this is a down side to podcasts who provide non time sensitive content that could be downloaded at any time.

Audio Archive from Archive.org – Free
Archive.org is known for its web crawler that archives your web page, and now have moved into the audio space.
Audio Archive contains over two hundred thousand free digital recordings ranging from alternative news programming, to Grateful Dead concerts, to Old Time Radio shows, to book and poetry readings, to original music uploaded by our users, as well as podcasts.
The downside to Audio Archive is if you have a 128Kbps mp3 file Audio Archive will compress it down to 64Kbps, but it is free.

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) – Pay for what you use
Amazon S3 hasnt been around for that long as the other ones in the rest of this list, but Amazon has pushed into this space with a bang, Bring you very low priced hosting at speeds that other hosting providers cant provide. Features are slime, but include the fastest Internet connection available, upload anything, pay fractions of a penny for storage, data upload, and data downloaded, and just pay for what you use.
This would be really good for the beginner podcaster because you would pay a lot less then other hosting solutions, but as your show grows bigger the bill will get bigger, and going to another hosting would be a much better choice.

Blubrry – $12-$60
I have to say one thing about Blubrry, they arnt going anywhere. The company reports are allows in the black and always growing with its products and services.
Blubrry’s Hosting services offer; Feature Rich Blogging Platform, Podcast Release Scheduler (schedule episodes into the future), RSS 2.0 Feed (iTunes compatible), Web Based Media Uploader with Upload Progress Bar, Rich Text Blog/Podcast post editor, Full Blog API (Supports WordPress 2.5+), Post to Twitter, Ping Weblogs (e.g. Google Blog Search, Technorati), Media Artwork Management, ID3 Tagging (writes information such as episode title to media files), Media File Naming (Portable Media Player Optimized), Blog Post Image Management, and Podcast Statistics Premium ($5/Month Value).
Blubrry also has its Powerpress plugin that makes publishing your podcast even easier.

CacheFly – $15-$299
CacheFly delivers more than 25 Terabytes per week for each of the most popular podcasts, Shows from Leo Laporte and Rev3 host their show with this company.
Features for CacheFly includes; 100% uptime guaranteed, Delivery on our Global CDN, Real-time reporting, Comprehensive access controls, 24/7 customer service, SCP, SFTP & rsync uploads, Protected links (md5 shared secret), and Access to raw logs (CLF).

Liberated Syndication (Libsyn) – $5-$60
Libsyn might just be the most populer media hostings services around, Lybsyn now owned by Wizzard Media, is hosting what might be over 10,000 podcasters.
Features for Libsyn includes; Storage space that grows with you, Unmetered bandwidth, No lock-ins, Your own RSS feed iTunes compatible, Customizable Webpage / Blog, Web and FTP Uploading, Stats Feature, Storage space calculator so you know what you need, Publisher’s Toolkit, Dynamic Ad Insertion, and Upgrade your active service level at any time with out service charges.

Mevio (Formerly known as Podshow) – Free
MEVIO is a large broadband entertainment company that focuses on personality driven programming. They have a solid audience base of 5-7 million uniques a month and are listed as a top 15 multimedia entertainment site, consistently ranking at or above the traffic levels of Hulu, Veoh, Heavy, Ripe Digital Entertainment, Spike.com, FunnyorDie, VBS.TV, Joost, and Revver.com according to comScore. Mevio is also listed as a top ten site for music and rank above Pandora, Rhapsody, Last.fm, Sony BMG, Live Nation, Warner Music, Napster, and Disney Music.
Mevio offers the opportunity to join MEVIO’s exclusive advertising and promotional campaigns to earn revenue, FREE hosting of your Video and Audio media files, non-exclusive and no commitment, Opportunity to be promoted on MEVIO’s 4 Networks: MEVIO Tech, MEVIO Women, MEVIO Men and MEVIO Music, FREE, unlimited blog hosting if you choose to host a WordPress blog on MEVIO, Access to exclusive publishing tools, and Access to publishing and promotional training.

If you use of one of these media services or know of a good one you would like to recommend , Please leave a comment below

Starting a podcast (if you already haven’t started) is a easy breezy compared to Advertising. When thinking about Sponsorship or Advertisements for your podcast, you need to know a few key podcast advertising Buzz/Online advertising pricing model words first that accompany your start to advertising.

CPA (Cost Per Action)

The actions defined in a cost-per-action agreement relate directly to some type of conversion, with sales and registrations among the most common. This does not include deals based solely on solely clicks, which are referred to specifically as cost-per-click or CPC.

The cost-per-action (CPA) model is at the other end of the spectrum from the cost-per-impressions model (CPM), with the cost-per-click (CPC) model somewhere in the middle. In a CPA model, the publisher is taking most of the advertising risk, as their commissions are dependant on good conversion rates from the advertiser’s creative units and Web site.

Marketers looking for cost-per-action deals have several options. Publishers with considerable excess inventory may be willing to consider nonstandard offers. Sites specializing in incentive programs are in a position to offer CPA pricing on various types of leads, although the usual caveats concerning incentivized traffic still apply. Perhaps the most widespread use of performance-based pricing is affiliate marketing, whereby merchants/advertisers determine what actions they want to reward and how much they are willing to pay.

Information provided by MarketingTerms.com

CPM (Cost Per Mille)

The total price paid in a CPM deal is calculated by multiplying the CPM rate by the number of CPM units. For example, one million impressions at $10 CPM equals a $10,000 total price.

1,000,000 / 1,000 = 1,000 units
1,000 units X $10 CPM = $10,000 total price

The amount paid per impression is calculated by dividing the CPM by 1000. For example, a $10 CPM equals $.01 per impression.

$10 CPM / 1000 impressions = $.01 per impression

Information provided by MarketingTerms.com

CPA and CPM are keywords to podcast advertisers that are used most often when talking to potential sponsors or advertisers, everything comes back to CPA and CPM so get to know the buzz words very well.

Page 2: Adverting Resources
Page 3: Talking to sponsors or advertisers

Searching for podcasts about podcasting, on google, Bing or other search engines is pain, I know I tryed. iTunes does have a section for podcasters but it isnt a good source. most podcasters need to submit to this section to get listed on it. and almost all podcast directory’s dont have a directory listing of podcasts for podcasters.
Its a real shame because those people that want to learn about podcasting search for both on itunes and search engines.
So I put together a list of Podcasts For Podcaster that are currently active providing content for you to listen.
If you know of a Podcast that Podcasts about Podcasting that is still podcasting (hrmm kinda a tongue twister) Please leave a comment below and I will add it to the list.

Podcast Academy

The Podcast Answer Man

Podcasters’ Emporium

The Podcasters Studio with Ray Ortega

School of Podcasting

Podcasting From Scratch