So how do you start a business Podcast on YouTube?

Many people think that starting a Business Podcast is difficult and expensive.  But with the free services that are available today, cost can be whittled down substantially.  After the podcast production itself, using these services to host and distribute your company’s content can be absolutely free, assuming you don’t mind 3rd party branding and/or a little extra work on your part.  One caveat, this method produces a non-downloadable, non-syndicated podcast which many argue is not technically a “podcast” at all (but let’s not get picky).  An example from our friends at Omega ATC is shown above.  I will be referring to it as we go along.

Let’s start with the part that is not free, but is the most important aspect of any business podcast.

Use a Conference Call or Webinar for Content

The production can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.  You can go crazy and produce a full-fledged video talk show, or you can re-purpose existing content—like a conference call or webinar—and call it a day.  While we at AudioFile Solutions always suggest you put your best foot forward and produce a completely professional event, many businesses find that extending the life of content that has already been produced can also yield marketing fruit.  For the rest of this article, we’ll assume that you already have an event—like a webinar recording—that you want to use to start your podcast (in this case, a video podcast).  Our conference call recording service and high definition web conference recording service can both be used for this application.

After the webinar has been recorded, you’ll need a 3rd party to host the video file.

How to Start a Business Podcast on YouTube

Many small businesses do not want to host the podcast files themselves because of the cost involved in storing large audio or video files on their server.  In our example, a typical webinar can yield a 30-80MB video file.  Add up several months or years of recordings, and your storage requirements will be substantial.

To start a podcast on YouTube—and let them host your video for free—open an account and click “Upload”.  It’s that easy.  For a webinar recording, it is important to use a high definition video as your source to keep the text and images crystal clear.  Using a low resolution video file means that large text will be blurry and small text will be unreadable.

After uploading, YouTube will create several different versions of the video.  You can access them individually by clicking the three digit number followed by the letter “p” in the lower right-hand corner of the player.  Choose “720p” or “1080p” to view the high definition file.  Immediately to the right are four arrows arranged in a square.  Click this to make the video full screen.  Using a high-def video from AudioFile Solutions as your source, you should have no trouble clearly seeing all the text on a typical webinar.

Note: View the embedded video above at 30:00 to see a good example of small text.  In full screen mode, at 360p, the text is extremely blurry.  Toggle the video to 720p to see the sharpest text.

Now that your video is live on YouTube, you can embed the video directly on your blog (as we did at the top of this article) by going to the YouTube page containing the video.  From there, click “share” and copy & paste the embed code directly to your blog.  If you don’t already have a blog, there are many free blogs to choose from.  WordPress.com, Blogspot.com and WordPress.org are all good places to start.  Or see Mashable’s article 40+ Free Blog Hosts.

Note: Keep in mind that YouTube can change this process at any time, so you may have to use some common sense when using future versions of YouTube.

With the video now embedded on your blog, and because your blog is syndicated (check with your blog host if it is not), you now have a low-cost non-downloadable podcast.

A final thought, but no less important, don’t forget to have your new YouTube podcast transcribed.  This will allow you to place the entire text of the podcast on the same page as the audio or video.  Not only is this great news for the hearing impaired, it is a necessity to receive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) credit.  SEO is beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say, search engines like Google must have on-page text in order to index your blog post, and a word-for-word transcript is the best way to do this.  Our transcribers are all native English-speakers, and our transcripts are done by hand using no automation, ever!

Ready to get started podcasting on YouTube? Contact us today to learn more about what we can do for you.

Happy podcasting!

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