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This summer, we want to show tweens how easy it is to make your own podcast for kids! The Middle School Mind is launching a three episode series to guide you step by step to create your own tween podcast.
If you enjoy listening to The Middle School Mind podcast for kids and you’ve wondered how easy it is to make your own kid’s podcast by kids for kids, we are here to help.
Making your own podcast is easy, fun and does not cost a lot to start. We are here to show you step by step how we make The Middle School Mind podcast in hopes that you will start your very own podcast. And, summer is the perfect time to start!
To get started, you will need the help of a parent or responsible adult to help you create your podcast on the podcast app, Anchor and download graphics and create your own podcast title card, you will need to access free sites like Canva and Pexels.
To make this process even easier, we recommend you download the attached PDF guide that shows you handy screen shots to walk through the process every step of the way!
Download the following step-by-step guide to help you out!
You are almost there!
You’ve planned and recorded your first audio segments for your podcast. You’ve got amazing looking Episode Art like the pros. You have just a few more (important) steps before getting your first official podcast episode out into the world!
Editing your audio
Podcasting is all about the audio! To keep your listeners interested, it’s a good idea to make sure all the ummms, ahhhs, dead silence or your dog barking in the background are edited out if at all possible.
In the last session, you Saved Your Episode as a draft, so let’s get back into your episode and click the blue Edit Audio button.
You will be taken back to the editing page and you should see the Transitions and Audio Segments you added to your episode on the right hand side of the page.
We used Transitions that came directly from Anchor so there’s no need to edit those segments.
What you want to do is to edit the Introduction audio segment you recorded and you can do that by clicking on the three dots on the right side of your audio segment and select Edit Audio.
It will take you to the audio file you recorded and you can see the peaks and valleys which shows a visual of where you were talking and where there were quiet spots.
This is where your Headphones come in handy.
If you scroll below, you will see a black Play button on the lower left-hand side of the screen. If you hit the Play button, the audio will play and a vertical bar that scrolls through the audio to show you the time stamp where you are in the audio file.
When you get to a section that you want to cut, stop the play button and the vertical bar will stop in the exact location.
Click on the Split button and your one long audio segment will now be split in two separate segments. For example, in my Introduction, there’s about 3 seconds of dead space that I want to edit out.
Once you select Split, you’ll notice that you’ve now got two segments. The first segment is the 3-seconds at the beginning where no one was speaking and the second segment is the rest of the audio segment.
Like I said, I want to get rid of the three seconds of silence at the start.
If you look at the first section you want to delete, there is a Trash icon in the upper right corner. If you select this, the first segment will be edited out and that area will change color to purple/dark blue shade and that portion won’t be heard in the final edit.
You will also notice that there are two Zoom In and Zoom Out buttons in the lower right corner. For this exercise, I only recorded a short 25 second introduction audio.
Typically, when we record an episode, it can be 30-40 minutes (or longer) of unedited audio. When you open that up to edit that segment, visually, it can be really challenging to edit the audio. I typically Zoom In a few times so you can see the audio and Split the sections you want to edit out much more easily.
Once you get all the umms, ahhhs and dogs barking edited out, hit the blue Save button at the bottom of the screen.
A pop up appears and asks you How Would You Like to Save Your Audio?
Here you have two choices:
- Save as one new segment.
- Save as multiple segments.
When I edit our episodes, I usually do two rounds of editing.
The first is to clean up all the goofs and umms and dead spaces. For that first round of editing, I will usually select Save as One New Segment. This ensures that the audio segment I just edited has one continuous block of “good” audio from a listening perspective.
During the second round of editing, I will usually Split the segment into Chapters as you can see below.
For example, in our very first episode, I went back and Split the segment to break out when we talked about:
- Who we are
- What listeners can expect from The Middle School Mind
- Son talked about video games that were really frustrating for him
Once I split up the segment into these three sections, I select Save and Save As Multiple Segments.
You don’t have to do it this way. When someone is listening to the podcast, they don’t know when you are going from one segment to another.
I choose to break out new topics into separate segments because it helps when you are adding a Transition from topic to topic. It’s also important to have different segments when we adding in a Transition before and after our Anchor ads that we place in our episodes. It is totally up to you.
Here’s one final note about editing your audio on Anchor.
Since all the editing and all your audio segments are saved in the cloud, sometimes when we cut out segments, we notice that some parts we didn’t want to cut get cut out. I’m not 100% sure why that happens, but I think it has something to do with the size of the file and all that data that has to get saved in the cloud.
That’s why I like to listen to the final cut of the episode to make sure it’s all there before I hit publish. It’s just something I choose to do because there were some portions during a trivia segment where the answer got cut out and the show didn’t make sense. I had to go back in and add that section back in so the listeners weren’t confused.
That’s just me, though, since I try to be a perfectionist. You can decide how detailed you want to be when you edit your shows.
Once you’re done editing, make sure to click on the blue button to Save Changes and you should be ready to Publish.
Claim your podcast on Anchor
Once you are ready to Publish your first episode, click on the Pencil icon in the upper right corner to edit your episode again.
Click on the blue Next button and it will take you to the section to name and claim your podcast on Anchor! You only have to do this the first time you are publishing your podcast.
In this section, you will be asked to Setup Your Podcast.
Here you will enter your podcast’s name, provide a description of your podcast, choose which category your podcast best fits and what language your podcast is in.
Click the blue Continue button at the bottom for the next step.
Next you will choose the Cover Art for your podcast by selecting Upload An Image. This is the main image associated with your podcast. You can select the Episode Artwork that you created using Canva earlier or you can create a brand new one using Canva that reflects your podcast.
Some podcasts create a new Episode Art for each of their episodes. For The Middle School Mind, we have a standard Cover Art that says the show name, The Middle School Mind, and we update the Episode Art to show the name of each episode.
You can Crop Your Photo by zooming in if you’d like. But since you downloaded your art from Canva in the 1080 x 1080 pixel format, you should not need to do anything else at this time.
Click the blue button Continue to go to the next step.
You can Add Text to customize your Cover Art at this stage. However, if you customized your artwork using Canva earlier including your podcast name, this is not necessary
You can just uncheck the Apply Text field and select the Update Cover Art button.
You can also choose to uncheck the section that says Show Anchor Logo on Cover Art. This is your call if you want to leave it in or not.
On The Middle School Mind, we show the Anchor logo on our Cover Art. Since Anchor is a free service, we are more than happy to promote Anchor to all would-be podcasters out there, like you!
Ready to publish?
If you’re ready to get your message out to the world, hit the blue button Publish at the bottom of the page!
Hit the blue Continue button!
That’s it! You did it! Congrats, new podcaster!
You will see the link to your podcast where it can be found on Spotify and on Anchor.
Under the section RSS Feed, there is a blue button Enable. I would recommend you select Enable. This allows you to submit your podcast for submission to platforms aside from Spotify and Anchor.
People find podcasts on so many different platforms like Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music and so many different places.
If you want to grow your audience, you should try to get listed on all the major podcast platforms. Enabling your RSS Feed is the first step to that process!
If you scroll down on this page, you can find out how to submit your podcast on those platforms. You may need the help of a parent or guardian to help. They will need to submit their e-mail address to verify the ownership of your podcast.
It takes time to get your podcast listed on these other platforms so please be patient.
6 truths about podcasting (from our perspective)
Now that you are a full-fledged podcaster, you are probably excited about the potential, fame, fortune and your chance to go viral! We want to share with you our experience podcasting since we started over 9 months ago.
We started The Middle School Mind in September 2021 and as of June 2022, we have published 16 or 17 episodes and we are still growing and trying to figure out how to grow our audience.
Here’s some learnings from our side when making this kid’s podcast:
- Have fun with it. We started out because Son wanted a way to get his thoughts out. It’s not a job for him and for me as editor, producer, publisher and promoter, I love doing it. I love having these random conversations with Son and putting it out there on our podcast. We do it because we want to, not because we have to. If our podcast ever feels like work, I think that will be the time to stop and do something else. So far, so good.
- Don’t expect to get 100,000 followers in one month or even 6 months. We’ve been doing this for over 9 months and we can tell you that we just hit over 1,200 total downloads and averaging 50-60 downloads per episode. We are happy without numbers and are enjoying the ride. Don’t give up if people are not finding your show right away.If you do go viral and get 100,000 followers – please tell us your secret!
- Don’t expect to make a ton of money (or any money) podcasting. After we published our 10th episode, the advertising optionon Anchor opened up for us. We have been running an ad promoting Anchor on our episodes since March of this year. The deal we have is $10.50 for every 1,000 downloads of our shows where we have ads placed. That was in March and as of early June, we have made about $8.35 total for those ads. Here’s the funny part, you can’t cash out until you have at least $10.00 in earnings. Think about that for a second. We’ve made about $8.35 in three months and we’ve been doing this for 9 months. So, if you’re in it for the money. Just know that, from our experience, there’s not a lot of money in podcasting. Do it because you like it.
- Having your own website is not necessary when starting out. I’m not a professional web designer but I also post our episode on our website themiddleschoolmind.com. Maybe I’m not good at it, but I don’t think it’s important for you at the beginning to have your own. Stick with the free tools like we described and see how you like it.
- Being a podcaster will improve your communication skills. You don’t have to be a comedian or have a professional newscaster voice to do well in podcasting. You gain amazing skills on how to talk about a topic, improve your storytelling and try to keep your audience engaged. Whether you become a professional podcaster in the future or you only do 10 episodes, becoming a great communicator will help you tremendously in your future.
- Just be you. You’ve got great ideas and thoughts in your head. Use your podcast to tell it to the world. Someone, somewhere is bound to learn something from you, or be entertained by you or you just might be the friendly voice they needed to hear that day. Be kind and be you.
Conclusion
See, making a podcast is not that hard and not that expensive. Plus, summer vacation is the perfect time for you to start your very own podcast.
If you need help, go to our website at themiddleschoolmind.com/about us and at the bottom of the page you can Contact Us. It may take some time, but we will get back to you.
When you launch your very own podcast, please contact us as well and let us know where we can find you. We would love to listen to your podcast and maybe Son could be a guest on your show in the future.
Thanks so much for reading and we can’t wait to hear what’s on your mind.
and Naming and Publishing your first episode in the next episode.
Enter to win your own Blue Snowball microphone!
Thank you for listening to the show. We really appreciate our listeners and we hope this summer school series will inspire you to Make Your Own Kid Podcast this summer break.
We want to help our listeners with making your own podcast and we will be giving away a total of (2) Logitech Blue Snowball microphones this summer to two of our lucky listeners. The Blue Snowball microphone is the same one we use to record The Middle School Mind and hope you will use it to make your own podcast!
If you want to be part of the drawing, here’s how to enter:
- Please leave us a 4 or 5-star review on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify or the podcast platform that you listen to.
- Please go to our website at themiddleschoolmind.com/about us and at the bottom of the page you can Contact Us.
- Send us your name, contact information and let us know where we can find your review. Once you send us this information, you will be entered into our drawing.
- We will be pulling out two names at random and will be following up with those winners directly by August 1, 2022.
It’s that easy!
Links to our Make Your Own Kid Podcast series
- Episode 1.20: Equipment Checklist and Plan Your First Episode
- Episode 1.21: Register on Anchor.fm, Record Your First Episode and Design Your Podcast Artwork
- Episode 1.22: Edit You Audio, Publish Your First Episode on Anchor, Truths About Podcasting
We are now a proud member of the Kids Listen community!
The Middle School Mind is now a proud member of Kids Listen. Kids Listen is a grassroots organization of advocates for high-quality audio content for children.
Kids Listen is creating platforms for producers to share ideas, and publish data and information relevant to creators, consumers, and supporters of podcasts for kids.
Thank you to our listeners!
You can reach The Middle School Mind on our About Us page, Facebook page or Twitter (@TMSM_Podcast). Thanks for listening!
Thank you for listening to the show. We really appreciate our listeners and we hope you have a wonderful summer.
For more episodes of The Middle School Mind podcast, check out our latest podcasts below
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