How I Podcast: using the Anchor app

I'm between wanting to puke out of nervousness, hide under the duvet in fear and do a jig in excitement A Correspondent

I received a question from a friend who is thinking of starting a podcast.

I thought it might help to post our exchange here:


Friend to John-Paul Flintoff:

I wanted to let you know how emboldened I am when I hear people talk about their own journeys, struggles and wins with mental health and creativity, so thank you for sharing yours and making me feel less alone on that front!

I’ve enjoyed seeing where your path has taken you and that you’re exploring things with public speaking and a podcast.

I’ve been looking into a podcast myself and am curious about your experience with Anchor. It’s all new to me and I’m somewhere in between wanting to puke out of nervousness, hide under the duvet in fear and do a jig in excitement.

I have a plan to just play around with it to get to know it vs. telling people publicly what I’m doing before I understand the work it takes and then getting overwhelmed.

Do I have it right that the other person has to download the Anchor app on their end? Has that been something people have easily been able to do?

I’ve thought about doing podcasts several times, but the editing part always seemed so difficulty and fiddly. It seems like Anchor does a fair job of reducing background noise and is less fiddly?


JPF to Friend:

I’d be happy to talk over what I have learned about Anchor. I find it extremely useful and easy to use.

I had two spells of doing the podcast in a kind of beta. I recorded several episodes on my own, posted them – and the analytics feature tells me that some people listened, but I have no idea who, because I hadn’t told anybody about it.

Then I unpublished them all, and changed the name of the podcast, to use as a semi-private space for people I was teaching public speaking. (I uploaded audio from our sessions.)

When that course was finished, I unpublished everything and renamed the podcast again, and started putting out what’s there now – telling just a few people what I was doing.

I have never used the Anchor “record with friends” thingy. Nothing against it, but I always record on Zoom, save the audio file and run it through the “compressor” function on Audacity (a free app, looks complicated but really not).

Good luck! Don’t hesitate to ask if you have any questions…