Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Making a podcast can be a lot of fun. But let’s be honest – it’s also tough work. It takes time. It takes focus.
Luckily, there are plenty of resources out there that can make podcasting life a little easier.
From creating social media content, to providing sound effects, here are 5 tools you need to know about. And the best bit? You can access all of them for free.
Headliner allows you to turn snippets of your podcast into intriguing video assets, complete with subtitles, audio waveform, key art, and more.
It’s super easy to use. Just upload your latest episode (or copy and paste the URL), select a clip, and customise. Download. Job done.
You can then post your assets on social media throughout the week to offer your audience teasers of your upcoming episodes.
Here’s a post that we made using Headliner for our gaming podcast, Extra Life:
Hack: Headliner also allows you to convert entire podcast episodes into videos. This makes it nice and easy to upload your podcast to YouTube if that’s something you’re interested in doing.
The free version of Headliner has everything most podcasters need. However, paid subscriptions are also available.
BuzzSumo is a very powerful tool. It allows you to cut through the masses of content on social media and find the things that are relevant to you and your podcast.
There are multiple scenarios where BuzzSumo can help, such as:
You can sign up for a free trial with BuzzSumo, and if you don’t renew it you’ll be enrolled into their free plan. This offers you 10 searches a month – use them wisely!
When it comes to adding sound effects to your podcast, you can’t just use anything. You need to be legally complaint, which means no using other people’s work without their permission (that’s copyright infringement!).
If you need a sound effect that you’re struggling to create yourself, chances are you’ll be able to find something suitable on SoundBible. It’s a free library crammed full of all sorts of stuff, from alien spaceships to game show sound effects.
Hootsuite is the social media management platform. There are various competitors out there (Sprout Social, Buffer, Later, Loomly) but Hootsuite is widely considered to be one of the best.
It allows all of your social media accounts to be in one place. This makes organising, creating, and scheduling content much more efficient. The platform also allows you to reply to messages and comments, and to track how well your posts are doing.
The free version has more than enough features to get you started. However, you’ll only get 1 user, so if/when your podcast begins to grow and your team expands, you might need to upgrade your plan.
Finally, we have Answer The Public. This is a keyword tool that tells you what exactly people are searching for online.
Let’s say you have a basketball podcast. You can search the term ‘basketball’ and Answer The Public will show you all the things people are searching for on Google in relation to this word.
This makes it easier to:
That should be enough to get you started. Which one will you be giving a go?
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